The need for cell phone surveillance

The investigation of that homegrown plot to kill police officers in Boston continues, but this much we know &#8212 without extensive cell phone surveillance, the suspects would probably have gone ahead with it.

Ussamah Abdullah Rahim was licensed as a security officer from Miami, but on Tuesday, he was shot and killed as he brandished a knife at police and FBI agents on a Boston street. And while the investigation continues, it’s clear cell phone surveillance was the key to unraveling the plot.

CBS correspondent Jeff Pegues says the FBI recorded one conversation with a man named David Wright which indicated they were plotting a beheading.

“Rahim told Wright, ‘I just got myself a nice little tool … it’s good for carving wood and like, you know, carving sculptures,'” Pegues reported.

“Rahim then told Wright something was ‘like thinking with your head on your chest,’ an apparent reference to beheadings carried out by ISIS,” Pegues reported.

Sources tell CBS News the suspects also discussed an attack on Pamela Geller, the organizer of last month’s Draw Mohammed contest in Garland, Texas.

But soon, small plots like these could become harder to detect. Even as these recordings were coming out, Congress was hearing warnings that radicals have started using encryption to make phone surveillance useless.

“We are past going dark in certain instances, we are dark,” FBI counter-terrorism chief Michael Steinbach told Congress recently.

Steinbach is asking Congress to pass a law that would allow law enforcement to crack those private messages.

“We are imploring Congress to help us seek legal remedies toward that, as well as asking companies to provide technological solutions to that,” he said.

Suspect David Wright certainly didn’t want the FBI getting into his friend’s smartphone. He’s heard on one phone call saying, “Throw it down to the ground. Get rid of it before anybody gets it. Make sure it’s completely destroyed.”