FBI chief: Phone encryption a ‘major public safety issue’

NEW YORK — FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday renewed a call for tech firms to help law enforcement officials gain access to encrypted smartphones, describing it as a “major public safety issue.”

Wray said the FBI was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices in fiscal 2017 — more than half of all smartphones it tried to crack in that period — despite having a warrant.

“Being unable to access nearly 7,800 devices in a single year is a major public safety issue,” he said, taking up a theme that was a signature issue of his predecessor, James Comey.

“We’re not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens,” he said at Fordham University’s international conference on cybersecurity. “We’re interested in those devices that have been used to plan or execute terrorist or criminal activities.”

The bureau has highlighted this challenge to its investigative work, which it calls “Going Dark,” for more than a decade. But the issue has grown more pressing, it says, with the advent of phones that not even companies can unlock because they do not hold the encryption key.

The Justice Department went to court in 2016 to force Apple to devise a way to help it gain access to a dead attacker’s iPhone after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. That battle ended when the FBI paid a third party to hack the phone.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last fall hinted that the Trump administration would take more aggressive steps if the companies can’t come up with “responsible encryption” that gives law enforcement access after a warrant is obtained.