This may as well be the best ever advertisement any company would die for…
FBI director James Comey criticized on Thursday that the encryption in the latest operating systems of Apple and Google phones were so secure that law enforcement officials would have no access to information stored on those devices even with valid warrants and asked why companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law”.
“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,” Mr Comey reportedly told the media.
“I want to have that conversation [with companies responsible] before that day comes.”
Law enforcement agencies place premiums on their forensic abilities to search sensitive data like photos, messages and web histories on smartphones – and also on old plain vanilla cellular phones to some extent – to solve some serious crimes: mobile phones increasingly perform and even replace what we used to do with our computers but thanks to the convergence of technologies, law enforcement and investigators are now able to use mobile phone forensic, much like computer forensic techniques, to retrieve data, including deleted data, from the phones as they did on computers.
The comments from Comey came hot on the heels of news last week that Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, is so well encrypted that even Apple Inc. cannot unlock their mobile devices. Google meanwhile is also adopting its latest encryption format for its new (to be released) Android operating system that the company would be unable to unlock.
Question: Has Comey approached the NSA for help?