Wray said the agency was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices in fiscal 2017 higher than half of all the smartphones it tried to crack in that time point notwithstanding having a permission from a judge.
“Being incapable to access nearly 7,800 devices in a single year is a major public safety issue,” he said, using up a theme that was a trademark issue of his predecessor, James B. Comey.
“We’re not engaged in the millions of devices of everyday citizens,” he said in New York at Fordham University’s International Conference on Cyber Security. “We’re employed in those devices that have been used to plan or kill a terrorist or criminal activities.”
He said: “We need to operate together, the government and the private sector, to find a way liberal, and find a way forward quickly.”
The bureau has highlighted this call to its investigative work, which it calls “Going Dark,” for distant than a decade. But the issue has grown more pressing, it says, with the arrival of phones that not even businesses can unlock because they do not hold the encryption key.
The Justice Department went to the government in 2016 to force Apple to devise a way to help it gain entree to a dead attacker’s iPhone after a mass gunfire in San Bernardino, Calif. That battle ended when the FBI paid a third party to hack the phone.
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein last fall suggested that the Trump administration would take more aggressive steps if the organizations can’t come up with “responsible encryption” that gives law enforcement access after a license is obtained.
As an example of a possible agreement, Wray cited a case from New York several years ago. Four major banks, he said, were using a chat messaging platform called Symphony, which was exchanged as offering “guaranteed data deletion.” State financial regulators became concerned that the chat platform would impede investigations of Wall Street.
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