Encryption blocks prying eyes so it annoys law enforcement

Oct 1, 2014 07:23 GMT  ·  By

US authorities really don’t like to see people protecting their own privacy with the help of encryption or anonymity tools. First, there was the report that if you were looking for encryption tools or using Tor you’d get NSA’s attention, and now it seems that more and more officials are annoyed about encrypted phones.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s on his way out of his office, is the latest to play the “think of the children” card while slamming Apple and Google for implementing encryption policies in iOS and Android.

“We would hope that technology companies would be willing to work with us to ensure that law enforcement retains the ability, with court-authorization, to lawfully obtain information in the course of an investigation, such as catching kidnappers and sexual predators,” Holders said during a meeting of the Global Alliance Conference Against Child Sexual Abuse Online.

This roughly translates into weakening everyone’s privacy capabilities for some cases where data access is needed.

Holder claims that it’s still possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while protecting personal privacy. “When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children,” Holder added.

FBI has the same stance

Last week, James Comey, the FBI director, also took a similar stance towards Google and Apple’s efforts to help people keep their information private and away from the prying eyes of the spy agencies in the world that have been completely disregarding this aspect in the chase to maybe find the needle in the haystack.

“What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law,” Comey said, adding that there are cases when information obtained from cellphones was valuable in child-kidnapping cases and terrorism.

While neither Google nor Apple are marketing the new encryption capabilities as anything more than a way to keep people’s information private, as it should be, Both Comey and Holder insist in painting the situation in a different light and using the emergency cases as their card to convince people that it’s important for law enforcement to have easy access to people’s information even though there’s been clear evidence of abuse so far.

They’re both annoyed that law enforcement officers would have no use for the intercepted information stored on the devices, such as call data, contacts, photos and emails due to the encryption levels. Even if they obtain a warrant from a judge, the data wouldn’t be of any good.