Devices being remotely wiped in police custody | Hacker News Reader

Devices being remotely wiped in police custody

bbc.co.uk

81 pointsmsantos73 comments

> "We have cases where phones get seized, and they are not necessarily taken from an arrested person - but we don't know the details of these cases as there is not a reason to keep records of this," she added.

Christ, this is the real story. Police seize items that don't belong to a suspect, apparently aren't important to an investigation, don't give them back to the owner, and don't keep records about these items.

Well, they're English cops. No bill of rights.

Well, we have the bill of rights (1688), but that's not relevant. We do have both the Human Rights Act, and PACE: https://www.gov.uk/police-and-criminal-evidence-act-1984-pac...

PACE specifies exactly how it should be done, including records.

heh. quaint comment. america is actually the most liberal (ie less protection from the gov to common people) of the developed countries.

no matter how much your politicians and hollywood tries to sell it as freedom paradise

"less protection from the gov to common people" is a liberal ideal?

all those "less laws" and don't "tell me what to do" has its consequences.

you will find out it works both ways.

No, and in fact I think you are severely confused.

yes. Conservatives seek to restrict government influence, liberal seek to use government to bring about the common good.

She even makes it sound as though the lack of record keeping was done deliberately as a CYA strategy.

C.Y.A. - Cover your ass

As the article makes clear, they're just incompetent. However police-types seem to be very conservative by nature which can lead to a very technophobic workforce.

It is pretty surprising how slowly police are changing with the times. You'd expect every major police force to have a "computer crimes" division, but they don't. Only really the MET (London's police force) has a decent computer crimes division.

You often read about digital crimes (e.g. harassment, theft, fraud, etc) going completely uninvestigated because of how few "digital police" they have (e.g. 1/1000th the size of the officers investigating physical crimes).

As a specific example, for almost a year when you Googled "UK passport renew" the first Google adword result was an obviously fraudulent one, yet nothing was done even though they had to have known about it.

PS - I bet you could use Tasker (or a similar app) to wipe your phone if it didn't regain data access for a long period of time (e.g. 6-12 hours). So if they took your phone and shoved it into a bag, the phone still auto-wipes if they fail to turn it off.

PPS - Although realistically you're best not storing the data on your phone at all. The UK police can force you to give up your encryption keys, however they would struggle to get your data off of a foreign owned-operated website.

> Only really the MET (London's police force) has a decent computer crimes division.

It doesn't surprise me. Doing this stuff effectively is very hard, the number of people who could get up to speed quickly is small. It's not like your company's IT department.

If I recall correctly, there was a sort-of mini bubble some years back where every force out there rushed to get a computer crimes division. We can all have fun imagining how most of those went.

I suspect for most forces the payroll budget is nowhere near large enough to hire people with appropriate skills, either. I've lived in places where the chief of police's salary would be considered entry-level pay by IT professionals.

This applies to every public sector job that's related to cutting-edge IT.

Why does every small town police department need its own staff for investigating "digital" crime? A centralized agency would actually be much more efficient for this, one that can collaborate with the local police department to match physical and digital evidence, perform arrests, etc. Not that I want yet another acronym agency charged with investigating everyone on the Internet, but it seems a waste to have each police department try to set up its own digital forensics lab.

In the UK a town (or what in the US would be called a "city") does not have its own police department. Instead the UK is divided into just 45 territorial police forces, typically the size of a county. So the parent comment is not as inefficient as it would be in a US context where each town has its own independent force.

You're 100% right except for one aspect: that it is surprising.

The highest quality services are ones with multiple alternatives and low switching costs. Monopolies tend to provide poorer service and are more conservative because there is reduced incentive or pressure to change.

Police are a perfect example of this; democracy is a weak lever.

Edit: This is not inherently an argument against the provision of the police as a public good. It could be accomplished within democracy by stronger localization and flexibility in choice of provision (e.g. allowing neighborhoods to opt out / choose their own solution).

I'm curious about how a system where law enforcement is supplied by a competitive market would work.

Don't go there. :)

It would diverge into racketeering, and then into Feudalism with different companies holding control of different regions.

Although it'd be a libertarian distopia. Libertarians want it so badly but they don't really understand that it is how the world worked a thousand years ago.

LOL, exactly why do you think we need so many licenses, etc.

If we don't have racketeering right now, how come individual police officers are allowed to keep the proceeds of any drug money they 'find'?

Also, don't most people pay taxes so the force 'protecting' them won't ostensibly take them off to jail?

When the police break the laws that are supposed to protect you is there any recourse for the police, or do they investigate themselves?

Exactly what we have is racketeering, however, we have no alternative forces from which to purchase protection.

If you read any book on the modern nation state it will tell you that the state is defined as the organization with monopolizes and projects violence over a given geographical territory.

    If you read any book on the modern nation state it will tell you that the state is defined as the organization with monopolizes and projects violence over a given geographical territory.

You mean... a libertarian book on the nation state. ISIS for example controls and projects violence over a region, but no modern country is going to recognize ISIS as a legitimate nation-state.

    If we don't have racketeering right now, how come individual police officers are allowed to keep the proceeds of any drug money they 'find'?

Because there are 12,000 individual police departments in America and it is literally impossible to police them all. The ridiculous decentralization of American police forces leads to racketeering.

Nations with a more centralized, top-down approach to policing do not have to worry about random 5-person police departments abusing the law in a small town in Nebraska somewhere. The fact of the matter is, random 5-person PD in the boonies answers to nobody, and such decentralization leads to racketeering.

Thank you for proving my point.

I know this doesn't sound right to you, but America is the libertarian wonderland you have been waiting for. And it leads to the problems you are apparently against.

And if you don't believe me, then please tell me... what action can you or I take against this behavior?

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/nebraska/nedce/4:2014cv0305...

I don't live in Nebraska. I can't vote for Nebraska judges. I can't elect Nebraska Sheriffs. I can't do anything about it, except avoid Nebraska.

The definition of states as entities that exercise a monopoly of legitimate violence is fairly mainstream in political science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

That definition isn't only used by libertarians, though it's possible that libertarians are more likely to use the "violence" formulation rather than the "physical force" formulation.

International recognition is possibly a separate issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_state

According to some theorists, there are states that aren't recognized as states, but may still be states. They may actually rule territory (perhaps quite a stable way) but other states still may not recognize them -- most often because other states support a different claim to rule the territory that the unrecognized state rules. A familiar example in Europe is Northern Cyprus, where there is a state-like entity that has ruled a particular territory with no practical physical challenge for a long time, but almost all other states in the world support a different entity's claims to that territory and wish that the existing ruling entity would dissolve or be absorbed into the other entity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cyprus

And there are a lot of other situations like that, often with positions on the claims determined by other political considerations.

Thank you for the response. I'll keep that in mind in the future.

Ok, so lets take podunk town out of the equation...

How about all the laws the FBI breaks?

How about when the FBI uses the exact same laws podunk town uses to seize money for their officers' personal gain?

How about the ATF selling guns to the cartels?

How about the CIA selling drugs to fund terrorism?

How about your police force being so centralized that your President believes he has the right to summarily execute any US citizen, you've centralized your entire justice system into the hands of one individual, judge, jury and executioner.

The US has centralized police and it's just as corrupt as many other decentralized forces. Also, many nations have centralized police forces that are corrupt. (Federales?)

Running away from your first argument eh? That doesn't strike me as very confident.

I'll take my win: you've already demonstrated ignorance in terms of Civil Forfeiture, and I don't have the time or energy to chase you on a wild goose chase all around US Politics in general.

Hint: Conspiracy Theorists always try the "shotgun" approach when they realize they don't understand an argument. Make a single argument, and make it count. Otherwise, I'm going to delegate you to the conspiracy bin.

Hint 2: My primary point was that policing is decentralized in the US. You've responded by... listing off a whole bunch of different police departments. There is no _single_ police agency in the US, we have competing, independent justice systems. Just as you Libertarians want.

Thank you once again for proving my point.

how come individual police officers are allowed to keep the proceeds of any drug money they 'find'?

[Citation needed]

No, I'm not asking for cites on civil asset forfeiture. I'm asking for documentation that individual cops get to pocket the seized cash.

Otherwise, I'm calling bullshit, with prejudice.

To be fair, libertarian political philosophers often hold up law enforcement as a shining example of why they're libertarians and not anarcho-capitalists: They believe that there are some things that only government can even hope to handle in an acceptable manner.

That said, I can make no claims for the self-inconsistent mishmash of far-right reactionary and jingoist flippity-flap that tends to pass for libertarianism in a certain country that need not be named.

In the US, I think the main issue has to do with most Police Departments only requiring a High School Diploma as an education requirement. I've had internships with Gov't agencies and volunteered at local PDs and it's a very common thread that a large portion of the workforce is computer illiterate. Sure higher education doesn't necessarily mean people will be proficient with computers but at least they will have exposure and familiarity. Also the people who make the decisions (higher ranking officials) are usually older and also phobic of technology.

The problem also lies with compensation. If you have the skills to be a good computer forensics officer, you can make several times more money elsewhere.

It's worse than that: some police departments will actively reject you if you're too smart. There are lots of stories about this which you can find with a quick search, including this one where someone was dismissed and lost their court case: http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...

I see the lack of seriousness with which law enforcement treats much digital crime as an aspect of the way society sees the Internet as less real and therefore unimportant. I also suspect this problem will disappear as those who grew up with pervasive computing gain influence.

I wouldn't describe this as "incompetent", I'd describe this as "the phone security working".

There are techniques for tethering the phone and then downloading data from it, but arguably these rely on loopholes that Apple can and should be fixing.

Phones don't have a concept of PACE. Until we can agree on a legal and technical system whereby the police have access to phones if and only if it's part of a criminal investigation, there are only two possibilities: too much police access, or no police access.

No police access. Forever.

> You'd expect every major police force to have a "computer crimes" division, but they don't.

I actually wouldn't. My (obviously potentially flawed) intuition would be that most "computer crime" could be handled by more centralized departments.

The comment about putting devices into a microwave is false.

If the microwave is from the 70's it will work, otherwise it will not.

Don't believe me/want to downvote me? Put your cell phone in the microwave and call it from a land line...

I've tried this over the past few months with a number of different microwaves because we wanted to know if the microwave would function as a Faraday cage... we tried it with every cell phone in the house, we also tried it with the cordless land phone. It didn't work. My conclusion is that a modern microwave will not function as a Faraday cage [Edit for clarity: for communications equipment (WiFi, Cellular, Home Phone etc.)] - I realize that may be painting with a broad brush, perhaps some of them will, but those I tried did not.

If someone has tried this successfully with a modern microwave, it would be useful to know what cellular/radio devices they tested and what make/model/year of microwave they used for their tests.

Microwave ovens most definitely function as faraday cages, however they are specifically designed to attenuate 2.4GHz signals. Anything higher or lower which isn't a harmonic (integer multiple) of 2.4GHz is going to experience much less attenuation.

My takeaway was that somebody is selling a hard drive that will wipe itself if you go through a tunnel.

You'd figure the timeout would be pretty long, 4 hours or so.

Right. Whenever evidence is collected, it's not going to be thoroughly analyzed/saved/etc right away. Especially not in a thoroughly sealed environment.

Just an hour - 2 hour long timeout would be sufficient.

Not just wipe, it will destroy itself. And as other users below stated there is a timeout before self-destruction. Ill bet its configurable too.

This was my exact thinking too.

> pop it in a microwave oven

Just popped my phone in the microwave oven. Was able to receive a call on 2G as well as 3G.

Huh.

I seemed to recall that Snowden made guests put their phones in the refrigerator, which is the same principle. So I went and tested my phone in on the work fridge, and you could still make calls to it.

Filing cabinet, ditto. Mylar antistatic bag, (which has a conductive layer, though not very conductive) ditto.

Tried some conductive fabric, which we sell for e-textiles stuff, and which the manufacturer's datasheet advertises as providing some 85dB of RF attenuation, and sure enough I couldn't call my phone anymore.

I assumed the fridge was more about "make sure the microphone can't pick up anything from outside" than blocking radio signals.

Yeah I think Snowden said that himself. It was about microphones mostly.

Well lets test that too then!

Switched off, in a tin can, in the freezer. Tin can to block radio signals, freezer to block audio signals. And switched off so the "normal" operation of the phone doesn't drain the battery (i.e.: continually trying stronger signals to reconnect with the GSM/3G/4G infrastructure).

You probably need to cook it a little more

A microwave operates around the 2.4 GHz frequency, so it likely shields only against those frequencies. This is where WiFi lives (in particular the higher channel numbers around 11 and 13). So test the impact on WiFi reception?

Older Wifi uses 2.4 GHz; since 802.11n came out years ago it also uses 5 GHz. Generally 5 GHz frequencies are recommended, when you have a choice, because usually there is less interference.

While we're at it: In the 2.4 GHz range there only are 3 non-overlapping channels: 1, 6, 11. I think 14 also is an option in some countries, not including the U.S.

I've done ping tests over wifi here (cell signal sucks at my house, so no way to do that).

Not a Farady Cage:

  * Chest Freezer
  * Fridge
  * Microwave
  * Tinfoil Hat

Faraday Cage:

  * Aluminum Foil Envelope, well sealed around all edges.

Isn't a Microwave a Farady Cage for the frequency used by the oven? I'm guessing the Cell frequencies are different so they can penetrate the cage?

I used wifi, since that's what I have access to. Wifi is in the same (rough) band as microwaves. It's probable that the one I tested with was old and crappy with bad shielding. When it's running, it's noisy enough that it will tend to kick any wifi connection from the 2.4ghz into the 5ghz band.

(I live in the boonies, and cell signal is 0 bars till I get out to the road, and even there I really only get texts)

I've retested the microwave, using a 4th gen ipod touch, with 2.4 ghz wifi only.

Just outside the oven, Speedtest is giving me 25ms ping, 10Mbps dl. Inside, with the door closed, it's getting 44ms ping, 1Mbps dl.

Interesting article. I didn't realise "romance fraud" was a thing.

It also swings both ways

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/19/undercover-policem...

It's an odd term, but I think what they mean is contracting non-romantic marriages in order to immigrate into the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_scam

From the article: "A spokeswoman for Dorset police told the BBC: "There were six incidents, but we don't know how people wiped them."

You'd think the police would know that some smartphones have a remote-wipe or kill-switch feature: it's something they'd tell people who report their smartphone stolen.

Article provided courtesy of SecureDrives

No...

This reminds me of a movie scene in Breaking Bad where they remotely "wiped" a laptop's content. Guess that's plausible now.

"The hard drive is constantly looking for GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] signals, if it is starved of them it it would destroy itself. It would see such a bag as a threat," said James Little, head of sales at SecureDrives"

Don't take your laptop on the subway!

Yeah, have fun shipping it, or since there are for the military, in a bunker, airplane, submarine, desert base...

Maybe slightly off topic, is there a program that would allow me to remote wipe a system if one gets stolen? Or automatically wipe out a system if it has not communicated with a central server for a set amount of time?

Hmmmmm neither Windows nor Mac OS allow for this, mostly because neither system can ensure a complete destruction of the partition its located on. However, there are plenty of laptops on the market(high-end Dells, Lenovos, HPs) which have built in GSM modems which can be issued a command remotely to wipe the hard drive.

You might want to check out the Prey Project:

https://preyproject.com/

>If we can't get to the scene within an hour, we tell the client to pop it in a microwave oven

Doesn't just switching it off achieve the same thing?

switching it off might activate drive encryption

Is it even possible with the battery taken out?

iPhone batteries are not easily removable.

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