FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones
FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones
By Craig Timberg and Greg Miller September 25 at 8:17 PM
FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and
Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that
law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on
the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.
His comments were the most forceful yet from a top
government official but echo a chorus of denunciation from law enforcement
officials nationwide. Police have said that the ability to search photos,
messages and Web histories on smartphones is essential to solving a range of
serious crimes, including murder, child pornography and attempted terrorist
attacks.
“There will come a day when it will matter a great deal
to the lives of people . . . that we will be able to gain access” to such
devices, Comey told reporters in a briefing. “I want to have that conversation
[with companies responsible] before that day comes.”
Comey added that FBI officials already have made initial
contact with the two companies, which announced their new smartphone encryption
initiatives last week. He said he could not understand why companies would
“market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the
law.”
Comey’s remarks followed news last week that Apple’s
latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, is so thoroughly encrypted that the
company is unable to unlock iPhones or iPads for police. Google, meanwhile, is
moving to an automatic form of encryption for its newest version of Android
operating system that the company also will not be able to unlock, though it
will take longer for that new feature to reach most consumers.
Both companies declined to comment on Comey’s remarks.
Apple has said that its new encryption is not intended to specifically hinder
law enforcement but to improve device security against any potential intruder.
For detectives working a tough case, few types of
evidence are more revealing than a smartphone. Call logs, instant messages and
location records can link a suspect to a crime precisely when and where it
occurred. And a surprising number of criminals, police say, like to take
selfies posing with accomplices — and often the loot they stole together.
But the era of easy law enforcement access to smartphones
may be drawing to a close as courts and tech companies erect new barriers to
police searches of popular electronic devices. The result, say law enforcement
officials, legal experts and forensic analysts, is that more and more seized
smartphones will end up as little more than shiny paperweights, with
potentially incriminating secrets locked inside forever.
The irony, some say, is that while the legal and
technical changes are fueled by anger over reports of mass surveillance by the
National Security Agency, the consequences are being felt most heavily by
police detectives, often armed with warrants certifying that a judge has found
probable cause that a search of a smartphone will reveal evidence of a crime.
“The outrage is directed at warrantless mass
surveillance, and this is a very different context. It’s searching a device
with a warrant,” said Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crimes
lawyer who is now a professor at George Washington University.
Not all of the high-tech tools favored by police are in
peril. They can still seek records of calls or texts from cellular carriers,
eavesdrop on conversations and, based on the cell towers used, determine the
general locations of suspects. Police can seek data backed up on remote cloud
services, which increasingly keep copies of the data collected by smartphones.
And the most sophisticated law enforcement agencies can deliver malicious
software to phones capable of making them spy on users.
Yet the devices themselves are gradually moving beyond
the reach of police in a range of circumstances, prompting ire from
investigators. Frustration is running particularly high at Apple, which made
the first announcement about new encryption and is moving much more swiftly
than Google to get it into the hands of consumers.
“Apple will become the phone of choice for the
pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police
department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got
to get an Apple phone.”
The rising use of encryption is already taking a toll on
the ability of law enforcement officials to collect evidence from smartphones.
Apple in particular has been introducing tough new security measures for more
than two years that have made it difficult for police armed with cracking
software to break in. The new encryption is significantly tougher, experts say.
“There are some things you can do. There are some things
the NSA can do. For the average mortal, I’d say they’re probably out of luck,”
said Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensics researcher based in New Hampshire.
Los Angeles police Detective Brian Collins, who does
forensics analysis for anti-gang and narcotics investigations, says he works on
about 30 smartphones a month. And while he still can successfully crack into
most of them, the percentage has been gradually shrinking — a trend he fears
will only accelerate.
“I’ve been an investigator for almost 27 years,” Collins
said, “It’s concerning that we’re beginning to go backwards with this
technology.”
The new encryption initiatives by Apple and Google come
after June’s Supreme Court ruling requiring police, in most circumstances, to
get a search warrant before gathering data from a cellphone. The magistrate
courts that typically issue search warrants, meanwhile, are more carefully
scrutinizing requests amid the heightened privacy concerns that followed the NSA
disclosures that began last year.
Civil liberties activists call this shift a necessary
correction to the deterioration of personal privacy in the digital era — and
especially since Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 inaugurated an era
in which smartphones became remarkably intimate companions of people
everywhere.
“Law enforcement has an enormous range of technical and
old-fashioned methods to go after the perpetrators of real crime, and no amount
of security effort at Silicon Valley tech companies is going to change that
fact,” said Peter Eckersley, director of technology projects at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco. “The
reality is that if the FBI really wants to investigate someone, they have a
spectacular arsenal of weapons.”
Sometimes, police say, that’s not enough.
Escalante, the Chicago chief of detectives, pointed to a
case in which several men forced their way into the home of a retired officer
in March and shot him in the face as his wife lay helplessly nearby. When the
victim, Elmer Brown, 73, died two weeks later, city detectives working the case
already were running low on useful leads.
But police got a break during a routine traffic stop in
June, confiscating a Colt revolver that once belonged to Brown, police say.
That led investigators to a Facebook post, made two days after the homicide, in
which another man posed in a cellphone selfie with the same gun.
When police found the smartphone used for that picture,
the case broke open, investigators say. Though the Android device was locked
with a swipe code, a police forensics lab was able to defeat it to collect
evidence; the underlying data was not encrypted. Three males, one of whom was a
juvenile, eventually were arrested.
“You present them with a picture of themselves, taken
with the gun, and it’s hard to deny it,” said Sgt. Richard Wiser, head of the
Chicago violent crimes unit that investigated the case. “It played a huge role
in this whole thing. As it was, it took six months to get them. Who knows how
long it would have taken without this.”
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