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Hello and welcome. I'm Peter Balland from Technicon.

These days, every major mobile telephone manufacturer offers highly effective encryption, and since

we keep so much personal data in our pockets, that is surely a good idea.

But what about the case where a locked phone is taken into custody by law enforcement

officials? We're talking about a phone that could possibly contain evidence of a crime that

already happened or is about to happen. Hands are tied without the password. And then what could

be a treasure trove of evidence is rendered useless.

And there is no help from the phone makers either.

That's not the business that they're in.

This need for law enforcement to crack locked devices in the absence of a password has continually grown through the years.

The EU-funded X-Files project has been underway for some time to remedy this situation.

The project aims to put into place a consistent and reliable way for police to decrypt phones which have been seized.

As you can imagine, this is no easy task.

But the X-Files Consortium made up of 14 partners, including law enforcement, universities, and cybersecurity companies, is well positioned to make a difference.

Today we speak with Nico from one of the world's leading forensic laboratories, the Netherlands Forensic Institute.

Thank you, Nico, for joining us today.

Thank you. Thank you. Tell us more about X-Files. What are you trying to achieve?

What we're trying to achieve is to access the data that's on mobile phones. Every mobile phone

nowadays is encrypted by default, and that's a big problem to get forensically

relevant data from mobile phones for law enforcement agencies to see what happened in a criminal

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