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Apple Tries to Find Common Ground with Law Enforcement Agencies

In February, the encryption issue reemerged after federal officials demanded that Apple help bypass the passcode on a phone belonging to one of the shooters in December’s San Bernardino attack.

(TNS) -- Silicon Valley executives and law enforcement officials told a House of Representatives subcommittee Tuesday that they’re searching for common ground in the fight over encryption.

But their comments showed just how hard reaching a compromise will be.

Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel, told a subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee that he works directly with his counterparts at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as his company resists the government’s calls to make its iPhones searchable during criminal investigations. In February, the issue reemerged after federal officials demanded that Apple help bypass the pass code on a phone belonging to one of the shooters in December’s San Bernardino attack.

But experts testifying at the hearing Tuesday said the issue was not as as simple as, say, cracking open a safe-deposit box at a bank.

“We can create an access point, and we can create locks,” Sewell said. “But the problem is the keys to that lock will ultimately be available somewhere. And if they are available anywhere, they can be accessed by both good guys and bad guys.”

Cryptography, he said, is the best way to keep people — and their bank account information, their medical records and their secrets — safe.

Capt. Charles Cohen, the commander of the Indiana State Police Office of Intelligence and Investigative Technologies, insisted that law enforcement agents need better access to encrypted data.

“I have also heard so-called experts say that law enforcement can get everything we need with metadata. The short answer is: We cannot,” he said. “Asking a detective to use only the metadata to solve an online crime is the equivalent of asking a detective to process a crime scene by only looking at the street address on the outside of the house where a crime was committed.”

Cohen added that in Indiana, if an iPhone 5s or newer Apple phone is offered to the state police, “we don’t even take that as an item of evidence anymore, because we know there is no technical” way to unlock the device.

In the last six months, the FBI hasn’t been able to access roughly 1 in 10 of the encrypted smartphones protected by pass codes that it has seized as evidence, said Amy Hess, the bureau’s executive assistant director for science and technology. In that same time, the New York Police Department hasn’t been able to access 102 devices — including a piece of evidence involved the shooting of two officers.

Both sides of the debate expressed frustration during the hearing, as did members of Congress.

Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, criticized Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp for declining an invitation to appear.

“It’s hard to solve a problem when the key players won’t show up for the discussion,” she said.

A spokesman for both companies refused to explain why they didn’t send representatives to the hearing but said the companies would remain engaged in the debate.

Sewell, meanwhile, tried to swat down a series of allegations that law enforcement officials made against Apple during the hearing.

“We have not provided source code to the Chinese government,” he said. “We did not have a key 19 months ago that we threw away. We have not announced that we are going to apply pass code encryption to the next generation iCloud. I just want to be very clear on that, because we heard three allegations. Those allegations have no merit.”

Hess defended the FBI’s decision to work with outside security researchers — known as “grey-hat hackers” — to break into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. But she admitted that she “does not think that that should be the solution.”

©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.