The FBI is once again having trouble getting into a mass shooter's smartphone.
An official
said at a press conference Tuesday that the FBI is unable to open the phone of Devin Patrick Kelley, who killed 26 people and injured 20 more at a Texas church on Sunday.
The phone is encrypted, meaning the information inside is unreadable without a passcode. The FBI didn't say what kind of phone the shooter used.
"With the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryptions, law enforcement -- whether at a state, local or federal level -- is increasingly not able to get into these phones," said Christopher Combs, the FBI special agent in charge.
The situation echoes the investigation into a shooter who attacked an office party in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015. In that case, the US Department of Justice sought a court order to force Apple to write software that would unlock the shooter's iPhone C without the passcode. The Justice Department dropped the case after a contractor it hired found a way to unlock the phone without Apple's help.
Combs said he wouldn't tell reporters what kind of smartphone the shooter had. "I don't want to tell every bad guy out there what kind of phone to buy to harass our efforts on trying to find justice here," he said. https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-unlock-texas-shooters-phone-encryption/
