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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:10PM
Instead of a warrant asking Apple to unlock an iPhone, couldn't they ask for a warrant for Apple to authorize a new iPhone for the suspect's Apple ID? (An Apple ID isn't exactly secret---a little traditional police work, possibly with assistance from Apple, could uncover that.) With a password reset from Apple, that would get them everything from that phone that is backed up to Apple's iCloud. (This seems to have been the technique used in that celebrity nude-selfie hack a while back---and they didn't even need a warrant to make it work!)
For Android, if they know the suspect's gmail account associated with that phone, they should be able to do something similar with Google's cooperation.
I realize that a savvy user might have turned off cloud backups, but how many people think to do that? It seems as if this would be a good Plan B for the police to pursue.