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Here's the livestream. The hearing starts at 1 P.M. Eastern time:
As encryption has increasingly become much more widespread among consumers, there is an ongoing national debate about the positive and negative implications it poses for consumers' security and privacy. Encryption is used to strengthen consumers' privacy but it also has presented new challenges for law enforcement seeking to obtain information during the course of its criminal investigations. For example, following the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, investigators recovered a cell phone belonging to one of the terrorists responsible for the attack. After the FBI was unable to unlock the phone and recover its contents, a federal judge recently ordered Apple to provide "reasonable technical assistance to assist law enforcement agents in obtaining access to the data" on the device.
Witnesses for the hearing are:
Panel I
- The Honorable James B. Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Panel II
- Mr. Bruce Sewell, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Apple, Inc.
- Ms. Susan Landau, Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- Mr. Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., District Attorney, New York County