Police Can Sometimes Recover “Deleted” Information from Mobile Phones
September 9th, 2008Chip implants? Most people willingly carry their own surveillance team around in their pockets.
That’s right. If you use a mobile phone, the filth can track your position on the ground in real time AND activate the microphone, turning your mobile phone into a audio bugging device. And this is all while you’re not talking on the phone.
But as usual, it’s not that bad, it’s worse.
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
Deep in the bowels of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, Sgt. Wayne Hom plugs in a USB key to activate a new high-tech tool that has become the delight of cops, the bane of bad guys and a cloud over civil liberties – a device to extract contacts, text messages, pictures and videos from cell phones.
“Around here they call me Inspector Gadget because I can wire just about anything,” said Hom, a former gang task force officer who now battles crime digitally with a new genre of cell phone forensic extraction devices.
Hom said these devices – made by companies including Cellebrite, Data Pilot and Oxygen Software – often can extract text messages, pictures or contact lists that the phone owner thinks they have erased, so long as new data hasn’t written over the old location in the cell phone’s memory.
Robert Morgester, a California deputy attorney general and expert on the topic, said that since cell phone extraction devices became available in the past couple of years, they have quickly become vital tools in solving crimes.
“The reason why the cell phone is important is that you are carrying around a personal diary of who you talk to and often what you talked about,” Morgester said in reference not to conversations but rather to texting, adding: “Youth today communicate through MySpace and texting.”
Cell phone forensic extraction is a relatively new technology that grew out of a problem faced by consumers who switch cell phone carriers and want to port their old data to their new device, said Adi Ofrat, chief executive of Cellebrite, which has offices in Israel and New Jersey, one of the vendors the San Francisco Police Department uses.
Since 2000, his 70-person company has sold more than 50,000 office-based cell phone data conversion systems to mobile phone carriers worldwide, he said.
“About one-and-a-half years ago we were approached by certain government agencies that said, ‘We would like for you to provide us with XYZ,’ ” Ofrat said in a telephone interview from New Jersey.
Research Credit: ottilie
It’s all like Brill said in Enemy of the State, viz, that the technology industry has been in bed with the powers that be for decades. The game is so rigged in their favour, the only way to get by is to break their rules.