This is a Technicum podcast.

Our mobile phones have become devices that we carry everywhere and which contain some of our most important data.

Knowing this, the manufacturers of these devices have guaranteed an extraordinary level of security.

As you can imagine, this is a real benefit to the users of such devices, but there are times when locked data has to be legitimately extracted.

And there's no help from the people who design these hardware and software entanglements.

I'm Peter Ballant from Technicon, and today we continue

our in-depth look at the X-Files project. This European H-2020 endeavor focuses on these cases

where law enforcement officials need to extract data from mobile telephones to conduct an investigation.

And for the record, they're pretty much on their own.

That's why X-Files is so important.

In X-Files, federal government, local law enforcement and intelligence agencies,

as well as cybersecurity experts, come together to create methods and tools to collect

the evidence they need from locked devices.

Today we speak with Nicholas from the National Forensic Lab for the French Gendarmerie.

Let's have a listen.

Welcome, Nicholas, and thanks for coming on today.

Yes, thank you to us this podcast.

My pleasure.

The first and presumably most obvious question is, why can't the phone manufacturers help with the decryption in these extreme cases?

In my opinion, they could help, but they don't want to. It is on the best interest to show that they don't collaborate with law enforcement agencies.

If we think about it for a few minutes, I think it's almost like a free advertising.

Like if they say, we manufacturers value whole client privacy more than helping the police.

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