As most of you know by now, an outside party has shown the FBI how to crack Syed Farook's iPhone 5c without Apple's help. The FBI claims that this crack will only work on the iPhone 5c but one has to wonder whether this is true or not. Now just because the FBI has dropped its case against Apple in this instance doesn't mean that the battle over encryption will be ending anytime soon.
Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have proposed legislation that would give federal judges clearer authority to order technology companies to help law enforcement crack encrypted data. So far, the White House isn't backing this legislation. There are many reasons why backdoor mandates are a bad idea. A list of some of those reasons can be found here.
The federal government has tried to create an encryption device with a built in backdoor when it created the Clipper chip. As the Wikipedia article details, the Clipper chip was a massive failure. The Clipper used a key escrow system in which a copy of the cryptographic key would be held by the government. Information about key disclosure law can be found here.
Given all the information stored on peoples' smartphones, encrypting them should be a no brainer. In fact, all iPhones, iPads and iPods running iOS 8 or greater are encrypted by default. Sadly the same can't be said about Android devices. It's estimated that roughly 10% of the world's 1.4 billion Android phones are encrypted. Compare that to the 95% encryption rate of iPhones. This is a sad state of affairs. The problem stems from the fact that many smartphone manufacturers use Android's source code and tweak it to suit their needs. It's this lack of uniformity that's the biggest of Google's problems when it comes to security. There's way too many companies involved in the process. This article details the problems Google has implementing security updates.
Both my Android phone and the SD card installed in it are encrypted. The same goes for my Mom's phone. If you own an Android phone, you should seriously consider encrypting it and any memory cards that are in it. I'm ending this blog post with a clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver regarding both the FBI vs. Apple showdown and encryption. Enjoy.
