Met Police to extract mobile phone data; will be kept even if no charges
bbc.com
bbc.com
So the device in the screenshot is a Radio Tactics Aceso, there is one sat across the room from my desk. It has been around for quite a while.
They are pretty good pieces of kit; but there is something of a limit in terms of the information they can extract (i.e. because phones are so "proprietary" it's only logical data they can easily recover).
> Until now, officers had to send mobiles off for forensic examination in order to gather and store data, a process which took several weeks.
Hilarious.
Anyway:
In a sense this is very old news (over the stuff HN is likely to be interested in); before if your tech was seized and sent of for analysis the data would be retained, no matter what the outcome. I can't remember the exact length of time but it is measured in years.
This appears to be extending the technical ability to "acquire" mobile phones down to the police station level. My thoughts:
* Despite how simplistic (and the Aceso is brain dead simple to use) they make it, there will still be mass confusion
* No one at police station level will understand how to secure digital evidence effectively (no matter how much training they hand out - it took me several years to get to grips with the minutae), I hope they have a plan to mitigate this.
* This is all part of the govt. plan to in-source as much of their forensics as possible. Which just ends up putting the technical stuff in the hands of people ill-trained to handle it, and risks more people being convicted
* It's not discussed, but I would be interested to see if this means they will be acquiring more data than usual. i.e. does this mean every phone will be analysed, or will they only do it for phones they could (in the past) justify sending off for detailed examination.
* In the former case (acquiring everything) how, legally, are they justifying it.
As a forensic analyst this whole thing seems to verge on violating every ethical and moral rule I would ascribe too. It increases the chances of abuse by many factors and reduces the effectiveness of forensic mobile phone work.
> The cost of leasing the 16 terminals for 12 months and training the officers will be £50,000, the Met said.
They are being ridiculously fleeced. I am unsure of the exact volume of phones they might process, but I suspect they could sub-contract it to actual experts for much less. I could process 10's of phones a week, for example. Mostly this is a Radio Tactics press release.
Even in the best case scenario they are reducing effectiveness, increasing error rate and costing themselves more money. From my side of the fence this is not the first idiotic thing I have seen the public forces do in recent months - and it won't be the last. As a member of the public I don't feel paranoia and insecurity, but I am certainly cautious about the way this is going.
(disclaimer; this sort of thing is what is making my profession redundant)
p.s. put a PIN code on your SIM and phone. From a practical perspective that basically renders Aceso useless (they can try and make you give up the PIN of course).
Initially and officially, no, but eventually in practice, yes---once the capability is close, cheap(/already paid), and easy, they'll use it more.
It's like Tasers, which supposedly save lives because they're way less lethal than bullets; if they really only used them when they previously would have fired a gun, then the only people who die from tasering would presumably have died without the taser as well. Except that someone with a taser is much more likely to fire (because it's "nonlethal") than someone who only has a gun....
In the case of the mobile data, "is it worth bothering" will get much more frequent "yes" answers when the kiosk is across the office than when the lab is across the country and requires days of waiting.
I have to admit I was pretty drunk once and woke up in a police cell. Would that count?
Many people are genuinely detained but later found not to have been involved.
What if you were arrested for killing someone whilst drunk driving, is your phone of relevance?
At the moment "everytime someone is in a station" doesn't mean your phone is of interest. I hope that won't change in the future, but there is no clarification of this in the article.
Best advice: If going to a demo, use a burner.
In Britain, it's a crime to withhold your passwords from law enforcement.
Without a court order there is no specific power to force you to reveal your passwords.
Forensic analyst here :)
Genuinely the vast majority of cops don't. And indeed IMO sending this sort of thing off to contractors is the necessary sort of separation to make sure that dirty cops can't incriminate you.
So on one hand I defend my profession; which I have always found to be supremely ethical and approach cases from the perspective of innocence.
And on the other hand I entirely agree; this move removes an important separation of evidence retrieval that means it could well be abused.
As told to me by some friendly police officers I would chat with.
"An law school professor and former criminal defense attorney tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police."
PS: this does nothing against phone numbers and text messages stored on your SIM (the vast majority of smartphones no longer do this, AFAIK)
What I would like to know is what will the tipping point be? When will the general public say no, enough is enough?
In theory, I suppose, it would be possible to fry the thing when connected. It's just a standard PC packaged in a special case (with touch screen) and you connect the phone via USB.
The people who do ask for it are obviously criminals.
You're being sarcastic, but we're moving in the direction of "police need unlimited power to investigate, so let's make it illegal to ask for privacy". And yes, we're a long way off from that scenario (at least in the USA) but I can see it on the horizon.
The thing that really scares me is the UK system -- CCTV cameras on every corner explicitly built for surveillance. We have a lot of cameras in the US (traffic, ATM, etc) but they generally belong to different entities and there is no comprehensive framework for getting (near)real-time footage from all of them.
http://www.dailypress.com/news/crime/dp-nws-police-cameras-2...
Then we were supposed to not give into the terrorists, but with these new hidden internet terrorists it's vital that we hand over our lives to the police.
It allows you to surreptitiously wipe your phone when you are coerced or intimidated into involuntarily unlocking it.
Oh, law enforcement. Gonna be a lot of pervy police officers getting exactly what they want. Not dissimilar to the airport Body-Scanner pictures that TSA agents were caught taking home.
I currently have my passcode set the wipe the iPhone if it is entered incorrectly 10 times. So, if I was arrested and I could erase all my data quickly 'just' by tapping a number on the lock screen 40 times.
Maybe it could be better still. Send out some automated texts, erase everything but the number for your lawyer, and start recording audio and video and storing them on a remote server when possible.
Doesn't work, there's a time-out of 15 minutes after the fifth try, if I recall correctly.
Also I could imagine the rise of planted phones - take a drug dealer's prepaid phone and plant it in your car if they want to frame you and make your life hell even if a conviction is eventually overturned.