> Wray said the bureau was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices in fiscal 2017 — more than half of all the smartphones it tried to crack in that time period — despite having a warrant from a judge.<p>So if 7,775 is "more than half," a conservative estimate of how many phone's they're attempting to crack per year (so far) is about 10,000?<p>> “We’re not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens,” he said in New York at Fordham University’s International Conference on Cyber Security. “We’re interested in those devices that have been used to plan or execute terrorist or criminal activities.”<p>How many thousands of terrorist cellphones do you really think they've seized in 2017? Maybe a dozen? This is the FBI, remember, so it's only counting phones seized on U.S. soil (goodness knows what the CIA's tally is, but that's a whole separate issue.) I haven't been on the lookout for "authorities append would-be terrorist" stories, and those definitely appear from time to time, but they're not a <i>daily</i> occurrence.<p>Terrorism isn't a significant factor in this issue, as a question of the FBI's day-to-day operations. It's just a word that surveillance hawks have discovered gets results. I'm sure the ~9,999 non-terrorist phones they're trying to crack were owned by some pretty terrible people, but if the FBI were saying "give us a backdoor into all your devices so it'll be easier for us to go after online-poker rings and weed dealers," they'd be laughed out of the room.