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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 12 2015, @04:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the prosecutors-want-access-to-everything dept.

The New York Times features a joint (and very one sided) opinion piece by prosecutors from Manhattan, Paris, London and Spain, in which they decry the default use by Apple and Google of full disk encryption in their latest smartphone OSes. They talk about the murder scene of a father of six, where an iPhone 6 and a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge were found.

An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large.

Except, there is no proof that having such a backdoor would conclusively allow them to solve the case and wouldn't require actual police work.


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  • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 12 2015, @02:17PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday August 12 2015, @02:17PM (#221686) Journal

    I have been wondering this as well. If whatever's on the cell phone is so absolutely crucial to the investigation, why don't they buy some CPU time from, say, the NSA and spin up a cluster of a few thousand John the Ripper [wikipedia.org] nodes?

    Of course, doing that, obtaining the password in a few days or so (assuming it's not “password” or one of the children's names or birthdates), and bringing a murderer to justice wouldn't move forward the narrative that only terrorists need strong encryption!

    Strong encryption is magick! Dark magick of the House of Slythryn! Voldem^#24j57T89$23+++NO CARRIER

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