Cops refuse to say if they secretly snarf cellphone data The American Civil Liberties Union has called on Michigan State Police to account for several pieces mobile hardware in its possession that can quickly download cellphone data without the owner's knowledge. “With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer …
> If they need a warrant to use the device
I used to live in Michigan, 20 miles outside of Detroit. I'm struggling for the words to describe the police in Michigan. "Entitled" seems to be the best word. They seemed to act as if the police resources at their disposal are always available for their personal use and don't even bother to hide their behavior. Around Detroit, many of the cops were dating strippers, which gave the strippers some protection until one of them ripped off a journalist.
Michigan cops have no honor and no respect for the law.
If you want to call me a Luddite because I really hate the fact that governments & multi-national corporations are gathering more and more personal data about individuals, in searchable, mineable databases, then yes. I'm a Luddite. In your eyes.
In my eyes, you're a gullible consumer. Enjoy your bliss.
Just try to remember that sometimes a telephone only needs to be a telephone.
The establishment relies on phone tapping because it knows that idiots just can't refrain from blabbing on the phone.
Whilst it's been ingrained in our culture for at least a 100 years (and from earliest childhood onward) that police et al tap phones, idiots continue to keep saying 'I'm guilty' on the telephone.
Why this behaviour is so predicable and so perennial remains a mystery to me, but it's as reliable as moths attracted to a candle and the outcome guaranteed to be just as inevitable.
Perhaps there's one good aspect to this madness in a similar behaviour, State secrets eventually nearly always leak because people invariably can't keep their traps shut (it's why WikiLeaks is such a cleaver model--like it or not).
union labor is expensive at government levels, with guaranteed hourly rates, and guaranteed amount of hours per day. Probably a negotiated caseload from when documents were hand-scribed, even though everything is now photocopied, printed or e-mailed. So anything more than a dozen pages per day (if there's "illumination"), requires an additional full-time hire for each mandatory maximum caseload assignment. Plus redundancy if someone is off for (insert racial/cultural minority hero birth/event date holiday here) because allowing the caseload to go above the negotiated amount even for an emergency is a big no-no.
yes I work for the government. We handle a lot of case type services this way. And have for almost a century.
"Michigan State Police officials have refused to honor the request unless the civil rights organization first pays a $272,340 deposit, which they claim represents half the cost of supplying the documents."
i think one can safely assume that if they have that much paperwork just on when the devices have been used, they have been used quite a few times...
Its already been concluded that the iPhone cache file does not track a persons every move. It only stores a visit to each cell tower area exactly once, further visits are not recorded. This is easy to see in the researcher's movie as their return trip is essentially three large jumps, which makes sense since there would be almost no new cell towers around.
If this device is claiming to be able to track people it must be using something else. In their website photos it's also clear their gadget is not connected to an iPhone, it looks like some microUSB connection. So maybe there's some larger thing at work here.
It would be interesting to know what...
Want what? This company seems to be able to supply location information for smartphones in general, not just iPhones.
I'm saying the cell phone mast location cache file in the iPhone mentioned in the article would not be enough to supply the information police wants. Not even combined with the Wifi cache one.
So is there some secret way of doing this embedded in all devices ie Android, Nokias, iPhones, Windows Phones? That's what I'd like to know.
Well color me amazed.. you are almost right..This is not implemented to be a location tracker..
Instead this is f***ing Google Streetcar data slurping territory again.. Except in this case they are getting -you- to carry the data slurper. Without your knowledge and without paying you to gather the data they will be using and selling.
This appears to be one of two recording systems in the iPhone;
- The first builds a table of cellphone towers / GPS co-ordinates.
- The second builds a table of Wifi Mac Addresses / GPS co-ordinates.
- I wonder if there are more?
And given that goal it would be probable that the data is only recorded once and is ignored if the same location is revisited and the details have not changed.
They are just building geolocation data, just like Google, skyhook, etc.. their motives do not look very sinister to me, but the practical considerations especially when combined with authorities who take every opportunity they can to copy this data (story from yesterday + border seizures and searches) it gets very scary indeed..
But.. that stuff about it being connected to 'something else', eg sinister black box.. come on man. Ever heard of a USB charger or a USB datacable? and what about all the other people who are reproducing the results.. do they all have a sinister black box too?
The tables mentioned don't appear to be that sort of thing at all. It appears they are just requesting that information from Apple or Skyhook or what have you, eg cell tower GPS coordinates and caching it in those tables. For example the Wifi tables have WiFI MAC addresses for locations I haven't ever been in. This as also been seen by forensics expert Christopher Vance in his latests post.
The sort of data collection operation you mention might be done using the *harvester tables, but so far no researcher I know of has seemed to be able to provide information on how they are used. Mine are empty, for example.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear on the "something else". What I meant is that the forensics device made by this company appears in all their photos to be used with smartphones other than the iPhone. This implies they may be using something other than this file to actually be able to track people and are able to do so for a variety of devices.
Just yesterday on the train, i counted 6 iPhones near me, within leg's distance, and 5 were iPhone 4's. Maybe Apple is tracking iTS phones for theft recovery. Imagine a thief is dumb enough to have wi-fi on and the iPhone (iPhone, for example) is fast enough to detect the MAC address of nearby phones. Then, when it is snatched, a non-down-commanded duress kicks off to indicate whether or not one of those earlier logged wi-fi MAC addresses the only one now moving at a fast clip with the phone sending a duress code.
First, i realize there may not even be such a duress app. User failure to deactivate it might needlessly trigger traces that may or may not involve police.
But, imagine if Apple is only giddily aroused and just trying to monetize the dizzying array of iPhone clusters, along with iPad clusters. Maybe this has something to do with a new product or service or feature that Apple will introduce in under 2 years?
As for Google enlisting involuntary datapoint slurpers... that seems plausible to me. It could also underscore wny (other than national directives and law enforcement demads) we don't have non-jailbreak user tools to tell us when and to WHerE and from what folders data on our devices is leaving our phones.
If this is related to Google's GIS-nuking powers, then once phones have altimeters and barometers in them, Google can offer Geo and Weather services. That is, that is if we're not allowed to disable those features, or if enough "incentivized" users opt in to the program.
Another thought I had yesterday was about Apple user loyalty. Imagine if Apple announced that once a month it would reward 10 loyal iPhoners $1,000 or $10,000, and that the users would come from 2, 5, or 10 clusters of iPhone users. This kind of program would not only help retain existing users, but also grab more. This could make sure the iPhone user base inexpensively grows.
No at all, I did confirm this myself (as one should) but it's also been clearly explain by a real forensics expert:
Read it up on http://blog.csvance.com/?p=136
"Will it give you a 100% accurate GPS point with Date/Time? No. Will it give you real-time tracking data to track someone? No. "
But it also says
"Can it help you narrow down timeframes and locations of potential suspects or victims? Absolutely, if used properly."
So you seem to be arguing against yourself with that link.
Who said it was a real time tracker? Who said it was 100% accurate - that isnt necessary for it to be a privacy issue.
The fact it provides this data to an external party at all is the problem. Not the fact it is only 80% accurate (enough to lose your kneecaps if you live in the wrong place, enough to see you in jail in most places).
Dont frame the argument in terms that never existed.
If you read the beginning of the article he also found that his Phone had cached points all over town, even though he never left the building and it was a fresh install. So this information is far from reliable and can't be used in court for example.
IMHO 80% is giving it too much credit, in my own experience from my own raw SQL I can't even pinpoint my house or work amongst a cloud of points, even with timing information. I can only figure out the city I'm in at most.
The real question for this article is if this company has access to more detailed data and how it manages to do so across so many devices.
> Apple iPhones and iPads log detailed information on users' every move and store it in a
> device file that's easily readable to anyone with physical access to the device.
> There doesn't appear to be any way to turn the tracking off, and the only way to scrub the
> device clean is to jailbreak it and regularly delete and wipe the file. (The file is also stored
> on computers that sync to the iDevices.)
Why for f's sake?
Sorry, I should have realised, FBI / CIA / NSA -imposed conditions of the licence sorry license.
1984 (although a little late) seems to coming faster with every article I read. Who watches the watchers? Don't these folk realise that we're all living on the same planet and there should not be "them" and "us"? Give people a mandate to keep "us" safe and "they" want more and more power. From my UK viewpoint, this looks extremely scary.
Them , are trying to kill all civil liberties in the USA as part of a larger plan by the GOP to totally eradicate the middle class and making life hell for everyone but the richest of the rich.
That they are at work doing surveillance on all comm traffic in order to spot anyone thinking by himself and quickly try to find a reason to destroy their lives is only natural.
They dont want the people to be able to stand against them.They just want to make you the equivalent of a brainless slave. Giving you candy so you give them a steak is exactly what they want.
Your data , your life , under their control.
They just love it.
The USA needs a revolution.
1. Michigan is and has been a Union and Democrat blue state since God was a little boy.
2. The Steve hangs out with His Presidency, the honorable Obama. And to my knowledge are liberal Democrats and have been since they appeared on this plane of existence.
3. Janet Nepolitano heads Homeland Security - Liberal Democrat pushing TSA scanners with those lovely mandatory "or else" intrusive patdowns on 6 year old girls and on Walmart TV telling the rednecks to report each other... cool with partial-birth abortions and such....
It's those damn Republicans all right! BURN THEM! BURN THE WITCHES!
Consider putting down the koolaid and try some tea.
:)
If you are of interest then they would already have the history of your phone's location and all of the data transferred over the air without needing physical access to the phone, so the only other thing this device might bring them is data that you store on the phone, (and if the firmware is backdoored then they might already have got that over the air).
The fact that it uses a cable does offer some opportunities for amusement, however, like perhaps they would be unlucky enough to find that your phone was miswired at the factory, so the data connector was accidentally connected to the capacitor of a xenon camera flash...
Because the frackkers will like.
Virtually EVERY major government with a security apparatus will demand backdoor or escrowed backdoor keys. This probaly is why we're going to increasingly see phones with multicores and huge amounts of RAM so that much of that processing power can be spent scarfing up information and encrypting it and stashing it in a hidden cache on the phone. Then, when you are less likely to notice it, your LEDs will not flicker and your logs will not report that your phone was relaying clandestinely-commanded micro-bursts to one or more "owned" towers so that you or other discerning users cannot correlate things.
It may even one day be that ALL phones handshake for whatever reason. But, CERTAIN phones will hold out a handshake and then TAKE data from phones double-back-doored so that data theft or government lifting won't go through a tower. The criminal or agent will just walk up to you and engage you a few minutes or sit near you on transit. Then, unless you get spooked and turn your phone off, you phone will be fingered and touched and groped periodically to establish a baseline of its contents in the event you only use the phone as a data-card-transfer device that does not surf or user the 3G or post 3G network services....
In the good old UK, home of the mother of parliaments, experience shows that the police have special rights. If you are arrested for ANYTHING, and a phone is in your possession (or even in your car), the Police can and do search it for anything. If they find text messages relating to any other crime, they can charge you with that and drop the first inconsequential charge you were arrested for.
No search warrant, no "please can I search you?".
Makes you proud to live in the English Police State.
Since humans are not infallible, it's possible an inept agent could corrupt the phone or hard drive. Doesn't matter if i take backups with me since they'd pillage those, too, right?
(Yes, i realize this could happen in the USA, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and so on...)
The UK cops wouldn't bother with these. Not because they're less sinister, but because this sounds like far too much effort for them.
All they need to do is ask your network provider under the powers given to them by RIPA. They know exactly where you've been for the last few months (and roughly where you've been for much longer).
From their website: http://www.cellebrite.com/forensic-products/ufed-physical-analyzer-2.html
ENHANCED DECODING UFED Physical Analyzer 2.0 introduces enhanced decoding, enabling support for multiple data types such as: chat, email, web bookmarks (favorites), web history, SIM data, cookies, notes, MMS, instant messages, Bluetooth devices, locations, journeys, GPS Fixes, call logs, text messages, contacts and more. The enhanced decoding allows much more data to be analyzed and displayed per mobile device.
iPHONE DECODING ENHANCEMENTS iPhone decoding includes call logs, contacts, text messages, email, locations (Wi-Fi and Cell Tower), web bookmarks Skype (contacts, calls and chat) and Facebook contacts. UFED Physical Analyzer 2.0 is also capable of parsing an iPhone backup as well as an iPhone encrypted backup with known password.
Anyone who still carries a cell phone after it's been proven to snaggle your dingleberries deserves what he gets. I suggest you also remove all fillings from your teeth with pliers, ride-share to work in a wheel barrow, and only eat food grown from your own dung pile.
The troof is out there.
This is the same state whose putative guv'ner is trying to pass a law that allows the state (read: The guv'ner hisself) to summarily fire the duly elected mayor and council members, and to "take over" any town that doesn't do what he wants them to (which is ostensibly to disenfranchise any all public unions he doesn't like...you know, the ones who tend to vote Democratic?)
"Ha!" is the wrong exclamation, AC. What you really mean is: "Sieg, Heil!!"
"...to encourage citizens to cooperate if they have nothing to hide,”
And is that "encouragement" something on the lines of "If you decide to insist on your Civil Rights like the Right to Silence, the Right to a Lawyer and the Right of Presumption of Innocence" then we're going to make things really hard for you because we'll assume that you have something to hide and therefore you're guilty"?
Mobile data networks are only engineered to maintain signal lock if the mobile platform is moving up to about 100 MPH. It actually works fine a bit beyond that speed (ah, so I've read...). But if you can get up beyond 140 MPH or so, then your Iphone may break signal lock and won't know where it is (sans GPS).
Thus, if you wish to keep your location data incomplete, speed.
How can one break the signal and maintain possession of the phone without violating safety/speed limits?
Cannon-launching it from place to place still leaves last known-orgin intact, right?
Maybe distributed/ghosted communications will work. (Recall ST Voyager "Tsunkatse" (and maybe a DS 9 episode... ) where the fighting arena's true location was masked so the matches could not be interfered with...
If you record the cell tower ID and the signal strength to it, you can calculate the phones range to that tower within a dozen meters. If you add a second and third tower you can triangulate your phones position quite accurately. Add time / date stamps on those records and you can build a fairly accurate map of where that phone has been. This is without any GPS functionality on your phone at all and is how many 911 calls have been traced in the past.
Even if you kill that process on the phone, the cell towers still record that data as your phone transmits to the tower(s) every 2 seconds as long as it is turned on. In the past, law enforcement needed warrants to get the cell tower info, but it has been available to them since cell towers were established and will continue to be so.
That law enforcement has additional technology today that can track a specific cell phone is hardly surprising as they were using that same technology to successfully position Osama on his VHF radio at Tora Bora in Dec 2001. The only difference was the frequencies involved.
People never seem to get that the Internet is a two way street. If you can get to the world, then the world can get to you (for good or evil). Same goes with your cell phone because it is in effect a small computer. Where you go, what you do and for how long is recorded by several systems. The only option to not have your phone track you is to not have a phone or keep it turned off.
Which is why the OS makers MUST provide to those of us who demand it a logger in our phones to show what processes and what remote sites caused access to and copying from folders on our machines.
The laxed-ass install rights such as "can write to and delete, can read..." are too wide open. Google, for example, in the case of Android, SHOULD tell the developers or installers to reword their notices to say, "can read/write/modify ONLY the associated folder, and NOT just any old other folder on your mobile..."
Law enforcement has NO right to demand nor expect to be able to tap into a phone and not be found out. If they want what is on the phone, they should be compelled to get a court order to TAKE the phone. But, no, they are excused of that requirement in some special cases. That apparently also means they are granted powers to sniff and snoop phones in ways that criminals do, as in without the owner knowing. Since there are crappy, CPU-bogging, RAM-hogging pages out there aplenty, it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE for us to know if it is malfeasance and intrusion and unauthorized trespass and modification (vandalsim, if you will).
Google and OS makers should help us by upping the ante on ANYONE who wants to trespass upon and vandalize a phone. Until the State OWNS and dispenses phones, the State does not OWN MY PHONE so long as I am not a criminal. Same goes for criminals.
Can we have a Bunker icon please? Preferably one with a Faraday cage installed :)
[Burt Gummer looks at his bomb shelter for perhaps the last time] Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter! Underground... God damn monsters. (and phone snoops)
and it *will* be used, period. Which means, giving power and ability to government because "your guy" is in power, is stupid and shortsighted. because "your guy" will be replaced by "the other guy" eventually and everything he does you will consider "misuse".
The solution? Don't give government abilities beyond the basic minimum needed for government to handle the infrastructure government was already specifically assigned to do. Doesn't matter if you're left, right or center-more power *always* will bite your beliefs in the @rse later on, guaranteed.
It helps to remember, at least here in America, that the population does *not* exist to make government's job easier, but the reverse. Sure some cellphone reader makes the police work easier, even if it potentially violates guaranteed civil rights...but that does *not* justify it's use by police, or even it's mere possession by patrol officers.
the only tool cops need is the ability to enforce the laws they have, and not be second guessed by attorneys playing ridiculous word games or by playing race cards in the Court of Public Opinion. Mandatory sentencing for serious crimes, and a shift towards punishing criminals instead of preemptive penalizing of the law-abiding at the highest policy levels is what's really needed
"If you record the cell tower ID and the signal strength to it, you can calculate the phones range to that tower within a dozen meters. If you add a second and third tower you can triangulate your phones "
Were I live at they have mapped out the distance each cell tower will transmit to a phone. The didn't do this with some theoretical formula but actually had people walk. drive till they moved onto another tower. So the police now know if you are connected to a certain tower you have to be with in this range. A few years back some jack ass politician was trying to force altimeters in cell phones.
The police force in question have a device that will allow them to pull data from a mobile device. OK we've got that.
There's nothing actually illegal or imoral about their owning this device, just so long as they are using it as allowed to by law. Got that too.
What some commentards seem to be missing here is the major issue highlighted by the story. That the force are trying desperately to block an FOI request in a manner that suggests they may well be using the device illegally is what we should be concentrating on. Not that the device exists or that the iPhone stores some sort of unencrypted tracking file.
People, the issue here is not that the police have a device that can pull data off a mobile device. Hell you can do that with the average laptop and the right software. The matter here is that they are being all secretive about whether or not they are only using it as the law allows.
Humm I've got 32gb of storage on my phone, about half full atm, but I can fix that :D
full with maybe 2-3k txts - mostly of the "do you want stuff at the shops" or "I'l be there in 5" but quite a few long personal sharing, maybe a few discussing medical stuff...
1k+ photos & vids (friends with babies, dogs and cats being cute, etc)
Slurping that should keep their little device busy for a long while!
Of course if a device like this was used to archive the data on my phone - and NOT part of a criminal investigation, then I have the opportunity to assert my copyright on the contents (maybe not on most of the texts, but certainly on all photos and video)
Wonder if we can 3-strikes the entire police force off the net?
The Taliban are famously iPhone addicted, but have recently demanded cell towers be disabled at night. The reason given was to keep their whereabouts from being reported by observers. Now we know the truth- the observers were their own traitorous infidel iPhones!
Steve the Infidel, of course.
In his short story "The Minority Report" PKD predicted targeted advertising based on the ability to know specifically who was nearby the holgraphic advert projector.
Steve Jobs liked the short story/bad movie so much that he built the iPhone specifically to collect the GIS location data so Apple could sell it to advertisers, more than likely so the advertisers could target the locations of signs and billboards, not to mention the value of knowing the number of people who spent ridiculous money on an iPhone who walk through a particular area or route.
When NFC (Near field communications) comes to all phones, you can bet the intrusive nature of advertising will become so granular as to send personally targeted ads and discount offers directly to your phone if not on a holographic display.
All of this data is worth so much money it would boggle your mind, let alone the privacy and personal rights issues.
Jobs, AT&T & Verizon should PAY US to use the damnable things instead of us paying them.
I'm going to predict a few things myself right now.
The makers of CrapCleaner are probably hard at work making an app that will scrub your iPhone/iPad as clean as a whistle;
Jobs will be hard at work making these files impossible to remove;
Sales of aluminium Faraday cases for iPhones wil skyrocket;
ALL Security/Police/Military agencies worldwide will be banning anything with an "i" from being used internally whilst simultaneously try to figure out how to tap this information from anyones phone via satellite/cellular/you name it wireless network.
Privacy activists will whine while they are on their Apple Information Stealing Device.
Big Business will give Jobs BILLIONS to make sure his products collect even more information without our knowledge or permission.
By the way, my phone can barely text and I like it that way.
Reality is a lot more scary than fiction, paranoia is not a mental disorder only a defense mechanisim for the pragmatic.
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