We Built a Database of Over 500 iPhones Cops Have Tried to Unlock
by Joseph Cox Mar 11 2020, 11:46am
With research support from Izzie Ramirez.
Law enforcement around the country have had varying degrees of success in trying to access evidence from locked iPhones seized from criminal suspects, Motherboard has learned as part of the most comprehensive analysis yet of iPhone search warrants.
Though some law enforcement agencies have accessed evidence on iPhones in the last year, many officials were unable to do so, adding nuance to the debate over whether the Department of Justice should continue its attempts to force Apple to create some form of backdoor in its products that law enforcement agencies could use to more reliably unlock devices.
The analysis found that federal authorities including the FBI, DEA, and DHS have extracted evidence from iPhones in crimes ranging from drug trafficking, to fraud, to child exploitation.
The data adds specifics to the so-called Going Dark debate, a phenomenon where law enforcement agencies say they are unable to access evidence stored on phones or read peoples’ encrypted messages even if they have a warrant to do so. Apple and #privacy experts say that having encryption enabled on phones and messaging services by default makes everyone safer, and that building a backdoor would make encrypted technology inherently weaker.
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4ag5yj/unlock-apple-iphone-database-for-police