Interview with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr., on his $10M smartphone forensics lab and balancing public safety while working under Apple and Google's rules
William D. Cohan / Fast Company :
Context & Ripple Effects
The interview lands four years after Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. built his $10M digital crime lab, a facility Fortune profiled in 2016 as analysts cracked devices and mined big data for evidence. That lab was born into the middle of Apple and the US government's standoff over iPhone encryption since iOS 8, when Tim Cook publicly refused to trample civil liberties even while cooperating with the FBI.
What has changed since is the asymmetry on the other side of the courtroom: the [[a:948181|Legal Aid Society's effort to close the tech gap between public defenders and law enforcement]] showed that prosecution-side forensics capability far outstrips what defense attorneys can access. Vance's framing — working under Apple and Google's rules — makes the point explicit: a prosecutor's investigative reach is now set by vendor software decisions, not by statute.
First-order effects
- Vance's office must keep re-deriving device-access methods every time Apple or Google ships an OS update, meaning lab budgets and staffing are hostage to two companies' release calendars.
- Defendants in Manhattan cases face investigators armed with lab-grade extraction tools while their own counsel, per the Legal Aid Society reporting, lacks comparable digital-forensics capacity.
Second-order effects
- Every encryption hardening from Apple or Google widens the capability gap the Legal Aid Society flagged, pressuring city and state funders to bankroll defender-side labs just to keep prosecutions contestable.
- Other district attorney offices watching Manhattan's model face a build-or-buy decision on forensics labs, concentrating evidence-extraction expertise in well-funded jurisdictions and pushing smaller offices toward commercial vendors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform vendors function as de facto regulators of criminal investigation — their privacy engineering choices, not legislative action, define what evidence is obtainable, which is precisely the governance question Cook raised during the FBI standoff.
- Sustained vendor control invites either statutory mandates for lawful access or permanent public spending on workarounds; which path wins determines whether forensics becomes a shared civic infrastructure or an arms race only wealthy offices can run.
The trend: Law enforcement's ability to extract evidence from smartphones is increasingly determined by Apple's and Google's security roadmaps rather than by public policy, forcing both prosecutors and defenders into a permanent catch-up cycle.