Ride the Lightning

The Prosecutors' View: When Phone Encryption Blocks Justice

August 18, 2015

Thanks to my friend Jim Calloway for making sure I didn't miss a story while I was on vacation last week. He sent me a link to a New York Times opinion piece penned by a group of prosecutors and entitled "When Phone Encryption Blocks Justice."

Of course, the alternate title might be "When Phone Encryption Ensures Privacy." In a world in which we are constantly under surveillance by law enforcement and governments (along with hackers and cybercriminals), the plea to have "the ability to unlock phones pursuant to lawful, transparent judicial orders" is a joke. Like the orders from the FIFA court? Or the cooperation of major tech companies that didn't require warrants to comply with law enforcement requests?

Yes, law enforcement got a lot of help from unencrypted-by-default phones. Evidence was served up nice and easy – which it had never been before the digital era. And now that the Fourth Amendment is getting some protection, it's hard to give up the easy access to data.

Will criminals exploit this encryption? Of course. They've been exploiting the protections of encryption for years – it's just easier now. But journalists have also used the protections of encryption – often to prevent governments from preventing the truth about their surveillance from coming to light.

Cybersecurity experts, as I have reported before, are pretty united in saying that governments cannot be trusted to protect back doors or to keep them from falling into the hands of cybercriminals and hackers.

To butcher a line from My Cousin Vinny, the prosecutors' case holds no water.

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