Smartphone encryption ‘means a child will die’, says DoJ

SMARTPHONE ENCRYPTION in iPhones and Android devices apparently has the US Department of Justice (DoJ) panicked.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that a senior DoJ official recently told Apple executives that strong encryption could mean that a child might die in a kidnapping case if police couldn't access the information in a smartphone seized from a suspect.

Apple and Google both announced in September that they will provide secure end-to-end encryption technology in mobile devices running iOS and Android.

The firms said that they will not have access to their users' private encryption keys, and thus will be unable to comply with law enforcement demands to hand over data.

DoJ officials, including US deputy attorney general James Cole, met with Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell and two other Apple employees on 1 October.

Cole reportedly told the Apple executives during the meeting that the firm was marketing to criminals, and that providing strong encryption would allow people to place themselves above the law.

Cole quoted the Cupertino firm's announcement that strong encryption would mean that Apple wouldnt be able to comply with a court order to retrieve data from a phone even if it wanted to.

He then predicted that someday some child will die, and police will say that they would have been able to rescue that child if they had been able to access the data in a smartphone.

It could, of course, be seen as the traditional 'think of the children' ploy that high-handed government officials invariably fall back on whenever anyone resists intrusive police state surveillance.

Apple's Sewell reportedly called Cole's hypothetical scenario "inflammatory and inaccurate", and pointed out that police have other methods to obtain data from smartphones.

Read the original post:
Smartphone encryption 'means a child will die', says DoJ