Feds are once again demanding encryption backdoors, but its own data shows it can extract data from phones without them.
The US government is once again reviving its campaign against strong encryption, demanding that tech companies build backdoors into smartphones and give law enforcement easy, universal access to the data inside them.
At least two companies that sell phone-cracking tools to agencies like the FBI have proven they can defeat encryption and security measures on some of the most advanced phones on the market. And a series of recent tests conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reveal that, while there remain a number of blind spots, the purveyors of these tools have become experts at reverse engineering smartphones in order to extract troves of information off the devices and the apps installed on them……