How many encrypted phones are stymying the FBI’s investigations? For the last seven months, the agency has been touting the number of 7,775 in relation to last year alone—but it turns out that the real figure was many times smaller.
As reported by The Washington Post, the FBI realized a month ago that its figures were way off, and the real tally of phones that investigators have been unable to access is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000.
“The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,” the agency said.
The revelation undermines one of the FBI’s main talking points in its battle against phone encryption—something that smartphone giants Apple and Google continue to offer in order to protect their users.
The agency has long complained that it faces a “Going Dark” problem due to this technology. Former FBI director James Comey said in his recent book that Silicon Valley’s executives “don’t see the darkness the FBI sees.”
However, those executives say there’s no way to make phones accessible to law enforcement without making them vulnerable to criminals and foreign spies as well. There’s also the fact that, with so much of our lives now being conducted over Internet-connected devices, investigators have unprecedented surveillance capabilities. As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it in the wake of his company’s epic fight over the matter, Going Dark is “a crock.”
With the encryption issue being so sensitive, and such a matter of weighing up conflicting risks, numbers matter. This is particularly true if the numbers appear to show a dramatic rise in the problem of inaccessible devices—the tally for 2016 was just 880, though that may now turn out to be inaccurate as well.
“Being unable to access nearly 7,800 devices in a single year is a major public safety issue,” current FBI Director Christopher Wray complained in January. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions has also touted the bogus figure, warning that “each of those devices was tied to a threat to the American people.”
We may be hearing fewer of these apocalyptic warnings in the near future.