By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
You can excuse Stephen Flatley for calling Apple “jerks” and “evil geniuses” for building notoriously impossible-to-crack iPhones.
After all, the tech company has made work exceedingly difficult for the FBI forensic expert and his colleagues who are tasked with trying to access suspects’ cellphones.
Speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security in Manhattan last Wednesday, Flatley said investigators are bedeviled by the iPhones’ increasingly powerful encryption, Motherboard reports. In fact, the cryptography has become so strong that not even Apple can break into a locked mobile.
“At what point is it just trying to one up things and at what point is it to thwart law enforcement?” Flatley asked. “Apple is pretty good at evil genius stuff.”
A day earlier, FBI Director Christopher Wray renewed calls for Apple to ease up on default encryption settings because they hinder investigators’ ability to collect evidence from a criminal’s iPhone.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the FBI has been unable to access data from nearly 7,800 devices.
“This is an urgent public safety issue,” Wray said.
But tech companies and digital security experts have said more lax encryption would harm internet security and enable malicious hackers.
