LOS ANGELES (CN) - There's a scene in the film "Casino" where Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci have their wives chit-chat on the phone so the two mobsters can avoid an FBI wiretap and set a clandestine meeting in the Mojave Desert.
"If a phone's tapped the feds can only listen in on the stuff involving crimes," De Niro's character Sam "Ace" Rothstein tells us via voiceover. "So, on routine calls they have to click off after a few minutes."
Watching the scene two decades later, it's clear that government surveillance and telecommunications have come a long way.
Even in 1995, the year "Casino" came out, the concept of a mass-surveillance society where citizens held their lives and memories in their pocket seemed to belong to some distant, totalitarian future.
That future is upon us. And in recent weeks, concerns that have accompanied technological advances have been crystallized in Apple's court battle with the FBI - a fight that has been brewing ever since Apple strengthened encryption of its devices in 2014.
In one corner, the federal government demands that Apple create a backdoor into the iPhone 5c of Syed Farook, who with his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people and injured 22 others during the December terror attack in San Bernardino.
In the other, Apple warns that the creation of new software could compromise the security of tens of millions of customers.
With its focus on terrorism, the debate over the court fight has largely centered on national security issues, privacy and federal law.
But if the government wins, investigators in local police stations and state prosecutor's offices could use the legal precedent to unlock smartphone evidence in cases involving homicide, sexual assault, robbery, identity theft and other crimes.
"While the San Bernardino case is a federal case, it is important to recognize that 95 percent of all criminal prosecutions in this country are handled at the state and local level, and that Apple's switch to default device encryption in the fall of 2014 severely harms many of these prosecutions," New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Before Apple rolled out iOS 8, prosecutors could go to a judge for a lawful search warrant. A pre-iOS 8 scenario: Prosecutors believe that video evidence in a rape case was on a defendant's password-protected smartphone. They ask for a warrant that would allow them to search the device, download the footage and use it to persuade a jury to put the perpetrator behind bars.
Things got more complicated when Apple introduced stronger encryption in September 2014, after whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency's mass-surveillance program.
With iOS 8, Apple allowed users to password-protect devices so that no third party could unlock them, not even the tech company itself or investigators with a lawful warrant.
Prior to the release of iOS 8, investigators had enjoyed a so-called golden age of surveillance with millions traceable by phone and swathes of the population sharing their personal information online and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
But with Apple's security update that golden age came to a dead halt, at least according law enforcement. Those opposed even coined an ominous phrase for the new security protections: "going dark."
