The FBI says it can’t access the Texas church shooter’s encrypted phone

A Federal Bureau of Investigation official said today that the agency has been unable to access an encrypted phone used by the gunman who killed 26 people at a rural Texas church on Sunday.

At a press conference, Christopher Combs, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, said the phone had been transported back to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia for examination. Investigators have identified Devin Patrick Kelley as the gunman in the shooting, which unfolded in the town of Sutherland Springs.

”Unfortunately, at this point in time, we are unable to get into that phone,” Combs said.

The comments echo other high-profile incidents where the FBI said it was blocked from accessing a phone because of encryption technology used in devices. Most memorably, the FBI and Apple went to court last year in a major legal dispute over whether the company could be forced to help law enforcement access a phone used by the shooter in the 2015 San Bernardino attack.

Combs explicitly drew the connection between the Texas shooter’s encrypted device and those used by others. “It highlights an issue that you’ve all heard about before, with the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryptions [sic], law enforcement, whether that’s at the state, local or federal level, is increasingly not able to get into these phones,” he said.

Combs said he would not describe which phone was used because he did not want to “tell every bad guy out there what phone to buy.”

In the case of the San Bernardino shooting, the FBI ultimately paid about $1 million for a hacking tool that allowed investigators to access the device, an iPhone 5C. Just last month, a federal judge ruled that the FBI would not have to disclose any details on the hack.