By Jonathan Alter, The Daily Beast, SouthFloridaReporter.com, Jan. 2, 2016 – Crooks and terrorists know: Everything on their late-model smartphone is encrypted. Could one small change both preserve privacy and help cops?
We don’t know what—if any—evidence was obtained from the devices in San Bernardino, but let’s hope they are not late-model smartphones. If they are, the FBI would have a much harder time learning details of the plot or warnings of where and when radical jihadists might strike again. Already, the FBI is concerned that it doesn’t know the contents of 109 messages that a terrorist exchanged with an ISIS operative in Syria before opening fire at a Prophet Muhammad cartooning conference in Garland, Texas.
These and other events have transformed the debate over end-to-end encryption, which until recently seemed the wave of the future. Last year, Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) began encrypting all new smartphones and throwing away the key. Without a password, it is impossible to find what’s in the phone. Talk to cops and prosecutors, and they will tell you they’re flying blind nowadays, prevented from cracking cases where potential critical evidence exists in smartphones. In the name of privacy, they say, Apple and Google are giving terrorists and criminals of all kinds a huge break.
“Talk to cops and prosecutors, and they will tell you they’re flying blind nowadays”
Talk to the taxpayers who are paying these guys to get off their butts and do police work instead of sitting in front of a computer all day, and they’ll tell you that they are PO’d.
Freedom isn’t free. If we want to be free of long, sharp noses beonging to governments and/or companies, we have to pay the price in the form of increased risk from criminal actions. As for me, I say I’ll take the risk; huge companies and governments are more dangerous than any criminal caboodle.