FBI Orders Google to Give it Access to Users' Locked Android Phones

From DailyTech: Today America is seeing alarming movement towards that fictional vision of the future. Top political candidates are supporting state-sponsored sexual oppression of the population. Police have been granted blanket powers of surveillance -- many of which require no warrant. The latest effort to step up surveillance is to try to bully operating system and device manufacturers into removing software that protects users' privacy.

The issue has come into the spotlight after an affidavit filed by the U.S. Federal of Bureau of Investigations in court-received publicity.

The court filing pertains to the case of Dante Dears, an alleged Californian drug dealer and pimp. Mr. Dears is an ex-convict who served time for his actions with the street gang PHD ("Pimpin Hoes Daily"). Upon release, police believe he reconvened with his former associates and went back to his lifestyle of crime.

Their monitoring indicated that he was using a smartphone to place calls with drug dealers and prostitutes. Mr. Dears' parole officer requested that the man surrender his phone for inspection. At that point Mr. Dears allegedly denied owning the phone. However, during a search of his house, the parole officer seized the device.

The phone was given to the FBI, who attempted to access it to search for evidence. However, they were foiled by the device's grid-based gesture unlock, a feature found in Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Android operating system. After exceeding the maximum number of attempts, the phone password locked itself, giving the agents a big headache.

So they crafted a novel solution -- get a judge to issue a court order forcing Google to:

provide law enforcement with any and all means of gaining access, including login and password information, password reset, and/or manufacturer default code ("PUK"), in order to obtain the complete contents of the memory of cellular telephone.

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