Police across US have tools to break into phones, report says
In a new Apple ad, a man on a city bus announces he has just shopped for divorce lawyers. Then a woman recites her credit card number through a megaphone in a park.
“Some things shouldn’t be shared,” the ad says, “iPhone helps keep it that way.”
Apple has built complex encryption into iPhones and made the devices’ security central to its marketing pitch.
That, in turn, has angered law enforcement. Officials from the FBI director to rural sheriffs have argued that encrypted phones stifle their work to catch and convict dangerous criminals. They have tried to force Apple and Google to unlock suspects’ phones, but the companies say they can’t. In response, authorities have put their own marketing spin on the problem. Law enforcement, they say, is “going dark.”
Yet new data reveal a twist to the encryption debate that undercuts both sides: Law enforcement officials across the nation regularly break into encrypted smartphones.
That is because at least 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states now have tools to get into locked, encrypted phones and extract their data, according to years of public records collected in a report by Upturn, a Washington nonprofit that investigates how the police use technology.
At least 49 of the 50 largest U.S. police departments have the tools, according to the records, as do the police and sheriffs in small towns and counties across the country, including Buckeye, Arizona; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and Walla Walla, Washington.
And local law enforce
ment agencies that don’t have such tools can often send a locked phone to a state or federal crime lab that does.
With more tools in their arsenal, authorities have used them in an increasing range of cases, from homicides and rapes to drugs and shoplifting, according to the records, which were reviewed by The New York Times. Upturn researchers said the records suggested that U.S. authorities had searched hundreds of thousands of phones over the past five years.
While the existence of such tools has been known for some time, the records show that authorities break into phones far more than previously understood — and that smartphones, with their vast troves of personal data, are not as impenetrable as Apple and Google have advertised. While many in law enforcement have argued that smartphones are often a roadblock to investigations, the findings indicate that they are instead one of the most important tools for prosecutions.
“Law enforcement at all levels has access to technology that it can use to unlock phones,” said Jennifer Granick, a cybersecurity lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That is not what we’ve
been told.”
Still, for law enforcement, phone-hacking tools are not a panacea to encryption. The process can be expensive and time consuming, sometimes costing thousands of dollars and requiring weeks or more. And in some cases, the tools don’t work at all.
“We may unlock it in a week, we may not unlock it for two years, or we may never unlock it,” Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, testified to Congress in December. “Murder, rape, robberies, sexual assault. I do not mean to be dramatic, but there are many, many serious cases where we can’t access the device in the time period where it is most important for us.”
Law enforcement regularly searches phones with owners’ consent, according to the records. Otherwise, a warrant is required.
An Apple spokesman said in an email that the company was constantly strengthening iPhone security “to help customers defend against criminals, hackers and i dentity thieves.” But, he added, no device can be truly impenetrable.
Google, which also offers encryption on its Android smartphone software, did not respond to a request for comment.