Police Can Get Access to Your Cellphone Data Even After the Supreme Court Ruling | Hacker News Reader

Police Can Get Access to Your Cellphone Data Even After the Supreme Court Ruling

fivethirtyeight.com

63 pointssinak30 comments

It's important to keep in mind that the phone holds more than location, call logs, and text messages though. It holds our photos, email, apps, the apps' storage, browsing history, and everything we do on the mobile internet. Putting that off limits is definitely a victory.

Or you could just stop using the tools that incriminate you? Voting with your feet works pretty well.

> pling: Or you could just stop using the tools that incriminate you? Voting with your feet works pretty well.

What a stupid thing to say.

Are you seriously suggesting that people "just" opt-out of modern life?

Is that modern life? No it's a prescribed vision by a few corporate entities.

Modern life isn't dependent on a computer in your hand 24 hours a day. Smart phones are pretty much like cigarettes that don't kill you (well unless you walk in front of a bus whilst checking twitter). Living without them is just as easy as living with them and a whole lot cheaper and without the monkey on your back.

It looked like you were calling 'photos' and 'browsing history' things that incriminate you and should be done without. Which is a pretty radical position. If you were just talking about having those on a phone you seem to be missing the point; those things should be off-limits without a warrant, doesn't matter where the personal computer is.

Either way the cost/benefit of a phone is not really on topic.

But I'm curious how a phone is a 'monkey on your back' when you have no obligation to check or respond to anything. And you can get a nice phone with data service for a lower cost than a solid wired internet connection.

Well it all depends on the context which is the issue. The context is defined by what you were doing and what they thought you were doing arbitrarily merged together by the better wrangler of words.

If you are doing something criminal or something borderline which may incriminate you, the best thing to do is not carry the phone which is my point.

However, the monkey on your back is when it becomes an entertainment and communication portal for everything replacing other forms of communication. At that point you rely on it too much. I see this so many times a day it's incredible.

It's not paranoia on my part but more that I create more things, communicate more deeply and enjoy life more now I have a shitty Nokia and less "services" to consume.

Everyone wants a slice of my attention these days. After some deep thought, they're not welcome to it as it's only finite.

If I were a drug dealer, I would take the advice of fictional 1960s mobsters in Goodfellas, and not use the phone.

and more recently Marlowe's crew in The Wire.

A little extreme. However they fail to mention that the police can take your phone and if it is not locked at the time they take it they can disable the locking feature.

Hence, if your truly paranoid about the authorities I suggest giving the ability to remote wipe your phone to someone whom you implicitly trust with instructions do so within whatever criteria you deem necessary.

A small amount of paranoia is good, too much and you need help

If that's the result of the ruling then it was fairly pointless. That's the same as saying that leaving your front door unlocked means the police do not require a warrant to enter and search.

You could leave the door wide open and the police cannot enter under normal circumstances. If accessing a phone requires a warrant then it would seem the same standard applies.

You could also stop using pen and paper, which will be exposed when a warrant is served.

True. I'm sure the very people that the police are most interested in are taking precautions about what the keep on mobile phones, and how they use phones. I recollect an article posted on HN some time ago about drug dealers using cheap non-smart phones and a pill pack of 24(?) pre loaded sim cards used in rotation to keep in contact from a different number each day.

Its the rest of us that have our stuff found...

Or you could just stop having anything to hide, right?

Such laws aren't necessarily designed to give you an out when police are looking for incriminating evidence.

It's also there to prevent a government agency from accessing your personal materials to find something to hold against you in a form of retaliation for some transgression or power play.

The two ways mentioned in the article for how they can still do it are:

1) Ask the telco nicely.

2) MITM with things like stingray.

#1 can be solved by telcos starting to say no, which might be easier to do now that you can blame it on economic fallout (e.g. Verizon losing the Germany contract). #2 will likely be solved by a successful court challenge by the ACLU.

Not hopeless, in my opinion.

How do either of those get the data stored on the phone?

Presumably, they would sniff traffic coming from your phone, which is what the article is talking about.

Here are some ideas:

-QUANTUMINSERT -> SS7

-CANDYMAN -> GOPHERSET

-WAP push

-Vuln. via specially-crafted SMS/MMS

-APN update

The police can get access to your cell phone data from the phone directly too. Its just that when they try to present the data as evidence in criminal court, you can prevent that by filing a motion to suppress that evidence. The police won't be punished for the search unless you sue them in civil court.

The same thing is true of the NSA, but the NSA never presses criminal charges, so it is only vacuously true.

It's not just about cell phone usage, but what data exists on your phone that doesn't leave the phone.

Badly worded title tracking location and meta data is not the same as searching your phone for incriminating evidence.

The title feels link-baity. The headline could say "what the police can get and how they can get it" but that wouldn't have been as clickable.

A question?

How does the 'tracking' of the movements and location of a cellphone by the cellphone towers and/or WiFi networks work?

Or, The tracking by the towers works all the time so that the cellphone network will know how to send an incoming call to the phone? If so, is there a way to turn off the phone so that it can't receive calls and can't be tracked, noticed, or followed by the towers?

1) Yes, your phone regularly communicates with the nearest cell towers and the phone company can't help but know which one. However, this is imprecise - resolution of a few blocks.

2) Most smartphones have GPS-based location services that use, well GPS, plus the combination of WiFi networks and their signal strengths. To get reasonable speed, this data needs to be cached locally, but only the data for where you've actually been can fit. This is the reason for the huge fallout a couple years ago about "Your iPhone is tracking your movements!" This cache can be read with physical access (and the device's PIN).

3) Yes, turning off the phone will do that. Unless you are a specific target, in which case law enforcement may have issued a software update just for you that makes the phone only appear to shut down. The only way to be sure is to take out the battery or not takke te phone with you.

Under your heading 3) I'm just wondering how long it is before someone makes a copper coated metal tin just the right size for each make of smart phone. Just open the lid when you want to make a call or 'sync' with your network of friends.

Could be fun if it went viral. Could even have pictures of your favourite politician on the lid, Theresa May for the UK model I imagine.

>Just open the lid when you want to make a call

If it became normal to put your phone in a Faraday cage while not making a call, no one would answer calls, and there would be no point in making them :).

An added benefit :-)

Seriously: observation on my daily commute suggests that actually making phone calls is a minority use of the mobiles that people spend all the journey stroking and looking at.

Public transit is an inappropriate place to make a voice call. People still do it at home all the time.

I do not think an "update" is needed. All of the functionality for a room bug is in all baseband processors: control of alerting on an offering call, control over LEDs and display lighting (or telling an application processor about an offering call), connecting, speakerphone, etc. All that is needed is knowledge of what is probably an extension of the GSM call control messages, and the ability to inject that message into the telephone network.

Thanks.

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