NEW YORK: The police are upset about Apple and Google’s latest smart phone advances. As both the Apple and Google do not give investigator the password of the users, even if they have a warrant, actually the problem is the encryption in both the iOS 8 and Android Lollipop operating systems.
“Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your pass code and therefore cannot access this data,” Apple brags on its site. “So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants.”
Google is not as direct in its security sales pitch for Android 5.0 Lollipop, shipping on the Nexus 6 and (slowly) coming to other devices: “Full device encryption occurs at first boot, using a unique key that never leaves the device.”
What Apple and Google tout as a feature, police see as a bug, and not the kind they can use to listen in on the bad guys.
“Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place,” FBI Director James Comey warned in a speech last month. “Justice may be denied because of a locked phone or an encrypted hard drive.”
To understand why Comey and others are upset, consider how cryptography works. Intensely complicated math yields a digital lock that cannot be picked in any reasonable period of time. If you want to see the communication, you either get the password, or you give up.
Digital encryption is at work right now, as you read this: Yahoo Tech (and all Yahoo sites) uses encryption that scrambles the data flowing between it and your browser. And your Web-mail service is increasingly likely to use encryption, too, so your messages can’t be read if they are intercepted.
How iOS 8 or Android Lollipop differs from most encryption is where the key goes. Instead of appearing on multiple servers, it’s a snowflake of a secret, unique and isolated to one device. It’s generated and kept on the device; even the manufacturers cannot get the key to decrypt a phone.
Comey and other law enforcement veterans want Apple and Google to relax the robustness. As former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey put it an event in Washington last month: “The toothpaste needs to get back in the tube.”
Yet police investigations still catch the bad guys. At one extreme, investigators have used court orders to plant malware on suspects’ machines to record passwords. At the other, there’s traditional police work: The Intercept’s Dan Froomkin and Natasha Vargas-Cooper noted that encryption had nothing to do with solving three of the four cases Comey cited in his speech.