Apple and Google to encrypt smartphones by default

Good day all. In response to repeated violations of the 4^th Amendment by both law enforcement and United States intelligence agencies, not to mention other criminals, Google and Apple have both announced that they are going to start encrypting their products by default.

This will occur when both Apple and Google release the next versions of their mobile operating systems. For Apple this will be their iOS8 and for Google their next version of Android will encrypt things like Smartphones automatically. This has law enforcement agencies at all levels in an uproar. Here are some of the details from Bloomberg:

U.S. law enforcement officials are urging Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) to give authorities access to smartphone data that the companies have decided to block, and are weighing whether to appeal to executives or seek congressional legislation. The new privacy features, announced two weeks ago by the California-based companies, will stymie investigations into crimes ranging from drug dealing to terrorism, law enforcement officials said.

“This is a very bad idea,” said Cathy Lanier, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, in an interview. Smartphone communication is “going to be the preferred method of the pedophile and the criminal. We are going to lose a lot of investigative opportunities.”

As I mentioned briefly above, the reason Apple and Google have decided to both encrypt the devices by default and more importantly, remove their ability to access the encryption keys is simple. We have seen numerous reports of local and state police, along with federal agents, taking people’s phones and rummaging through them for anything that could be used to arrest them. They have also gone into people’s phones and deleted pictures and videos of law enforcement officers basically acting like Gestapo goons and not as servants of the public.

Then we have the National Security Agency spying American citizens INSIDE the borders of the United States. Now most people who have any sort of technical background always assumed the NSA might be scooping up peoples calls and data. After all, cell phones are basically two way radios and the NSA is set up to intercept radio signals. What people believed was that the NSA and other agencies had a process in place to purge data that they shouldn’t have collected. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that not only was the NSA not purging the data, they’re building more data centers to handle the huge amount of information they’re collecting on people.

The dispute is the latest flare-up that pits the federal government against the nation’s leading technology companies since National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed last year the extent of U.S. snooping on phone and Internet communications — and how companies cooperated.

That information really smacked all the tech companies in the head. In many cases, the telecom companies such as Verizon, Comcast and others, just handed people’s data over with no attempt to fight it. Other companies did try to fight and were threatened by the FBI if they told anyone about the data that they demanded.

We also have a problem with criminals cracking into people’s smartphones and stealing their pictures and data. Recently, a number of, well lets be honest, not very bright actors and actresses had their phone data hacked and the nude pictures they had taken of themselves spread all over the internet. Because of this, Apple and Google responded to what their customers wanted.

“These companies are trying to build products that people want to use,” said Carl Howe, a mobility analyst with 451 Research in Boston. “They want to provide that feeling of privacy. Otherwise, people won’t use them.”

Apple described the new measures on Sept. 17 on its website, noting that it can no longer bypass customers’ passcodes and “therefore cannot access this data.” Apple has in the past cooperated with court orders and unlocked phones for law enforcement or provided data from its systems. Apple’s message said in most cases law enforcement doesn’t ask for content such as e-mails, photos or data stored on its iCloud or iTunes accounts.

“It’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running” the latest version of the company’s operating system, iOS 8, the Cupertino, California-based company said.

As I understand it, Apple had the encryption keys to all the Iphones they sold. If police wanted a phone unlocked, they would demand that apple hand over the keys. Once law enforcement forensic specialists had the key, they could unlock the suspects phones and see if anything interesting was on them. This really put companies like Apple and Google in a difficult position. Their answer was to take themselves out of the equation.

Recently, a number of people have started fighting back against LEO’s rooting through their phones. They have gone into court and demanded that anything that was found be tossed out. Since a lot of the information was collected without a search warrant, and considering that people tend to have all sorts of documents on their phones, they assumed that LEO’s couldn’t just loot and pillage through them. LEO’s used a legal doctrine that the information was being held by a third party and that the owners of the devices had no expectation of privacy.

That was the case until last June when the United States Supreme Court ruled that Law Enforcement Organizations may NOT just go through people’s cellphones without a warrant. LEO’s looked at that decision, understood that now they would have to have a warrant, and proceeded to get them and serve them on companies such as Apple rather then on the owner of the device. Gee, is it any wonder that Apple and Google want to make it impossible for themselves to comply with a warrant like this? As you might expect, the assorted LEO’s are not happy about this.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey entered the debate last week, telling reporters that he opposed the companies’ decision. He said the FBI was working to get them to change the policies.

“What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law,” Comey said.

Considering that your agency is noted for illegally spying on people, I’m not at all surprised that you aren’t happy with what Apple and other companies are now starting to do.

James Soiles, a deputy chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the stakes in resolving the dispute are high.

“It’s a significant issue for law enforcement,” Soiles said. “As long as we are doing it with court orders, there shouldn’t be any reason to keep us from it. We want to attack command-and-control structures of drug organizations, and to do that we have to be able to exploit their communication devices.”

I won’t go into my opinion on the so called “War on Drugs.” That mess is one of the major reasons the constitutional rights of people have been steamrollered over the last 40+ years. However, what Mr. Soiles is not saying is that the major kingpins already take precautions to keep you from getting anything from their computers and smartphones already. It’s only the low level idiots who like to partake of their own products, that don’t protect their systems.

Andrew Weissmann, the top lawyer at the FBI from 2011 through 2013, said the bureau was especially concerned that criminals could soon “go dark” with the aid of encryption.

“They have created a system that is a free-for-all for criminals,” said Weissmann, a law professor at New York University. “It’s the wrong balancing act. Having court-ordered access to telephones is essential to thwart criminal acts and terrorist acts.”

And here we are seeing the thought process of those in Law Enforcement. Never mind people’s rights, anything that makes life difficult for LEO’s is bad and must be stopped!

Weissmann said there was little the Justice Department could do to stop the emerging policies. The companies are permitted to have encryption systems. The only way to ensure law enforcement access is for Congress to pass legislation, he said.

And that’s worked out so well in the past, hasn’t it? It never crosses their incompetent brains that anything they can get through congress to let them break into cellphones, computers and the like WILL be used by criminals to steal people’s data and financial information. They first tried to stop private encryption when Phil Zimmerman created PGP almost 25 years ago ((History of Pretty Good Privacy)). Back then, strong encryption was literally classed as a “Munition” and couldn’t be exported without a license. Since Zimmerman released both a compiled version and the source code, the Federal Government tried to put him into jail ((Criminal investigation of Phil Zimmerman)). The Federal Government finally gave up for a number of reasons, one of which was the horse was long gone and locking the door, (along with locking up Zimmerman), was pointless.

High end criminals and terrorists have the means to protect their data in ways that the FBI and NSA can’t crack right now. Low end terrorists and criminals are generally pretty stupid, and it’s usually a lot simpler to just look on Facebook or YouTube for evidence of their crimes ((8 Dumb Criminals Caught Through Facebook)).

LEO’s at all levels need to stop looking for questionable shortcuts and just get back to doing good old investigative police work. Stop spending huge amounts of money on poorly trained SWAT teams that like to crash doors and start spending it on forensic laboratories and really smart cops. You would be surprised at what you would accomplish. We need more Detective Columbo’s ((Columbo)) and a lot fewer Inspector Clouseau’s ((Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau)).

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~