UK Police Roll Out On-the-Spot Mobile Data Extraction System 145
Qedward writes "The Metropolitan Police has rolled out a mobile device data extraction system to allow officers to extract data 'within minutes' from suspects' phones while they are in custody. 'Ostensibly, the system has been deployed to target phones that are suspected of having actually been used in criminal activity, although data privacy campaigners may focus on potentially wider use.'"
Too cumbersome (Score:5, Funny)
Seems like it would save a lot of trouble.
Re:Too cumbersome (Score:4, Funny)
And I, for one, welcome our ne.....err...current overlords.
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Already happens.
Everything sent through Cell phones, or land lines goes through a switch site, there it is mirrored, basically copied to giant memory banks for Government use. They may not access it without a search warrant, but you can bet that it's all there. Calls and texts.
Oh Goody! (Score:2)
Touchscreen just broke on my damned phone. Maybe if I drive over there they can tell me who these last 4 texts are from.
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Touchscreen just broke on my damned phone. Maybe if I drive over there they can tell me who these last 4 texts are from.
Your mom, you mom, your mom and your mom: please come up for dinner and for once stop with that damned computer of yours!
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Also i am sure they retain the data... so a good backup system?
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Why not just have all cell phone communications pass through government servers where everything can be easily skimmed and saved?
In Europe, they have realised this already and implemented what is called the "FRA law" for warrantless wiretaps of everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
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Not only that, they're not even a full-fledged EU country, as they still have their own currency; their situation seems to be similar to that of the UK, which most people don't seem to think of as a part of the European Union.
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What do you mean 'have`, it's already in place it's called Echelon [wikipedia.org].
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Yeah , but the real burning question is when are these silly fops going to have enough abuse, revolt, and hang Parliament , the royals and the tabloid journalists from the lampposts? If not, maybe they just like the pain. Hey, maybe some English are just dying to be tied up and have the hide waled off their backsides. Bet they get a stiffie.
Last time that happened England ended up with Cromwell. In any case it's worth waiting to see how the experiment in USA turns out after the terrorists there revolted. So far its not looking promising.
Michigan (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like the UK beat Michigan to the punch.
http://slashdot.org/story/11/04/19/2231240/michigan-police-could-search-cell-phones-during-traffic-stops [slashdot.org]
It's not "the UK". (Score:4, Informative)
The Metropolitan Police are in London. That's one city. It's the capital city, and it's a pretty big city, so there is a police force that deal with pretty much just that. They don't even deal with the outlying parts of the Greater London area.
If the police in Washington DC rolled this out, would you say "US Police"? No, because that would be stupid. It's one city, not the whole country.
Yeah, because... (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, because... (Score:5, Informative)
Bear in mind that the UK consists of four different countries and a bunch of principalities, and at least one country - Scotland - has entirely different laws and indeed an entirely different legal system to all the rest. About the only thing we share with the rest of the UK is our currency and our mains voltage.
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Your comment gave me a great deal of relief though; but realistically, how much safer are people in Scotland? Doesn't the central UK Ministry of Peace have a way of slowly forcing its rot into its member states, lik
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Not safe at all. They die at least 20 years younger of eating and drinking too much/the wrong thing. A diet of Scottish and Newcastle Beer and deep fried Mars Bars is a worse risk than Rapier missiles. And the Glaswegian accent can cause serious brain damage too.how much safer are people in Scotland?
The "Olympic scandal" (Score:2)
I don't know what the 'Olympics scandal' is. The cost of the thing is a scandal, but then these things always are expensive.
Well, aside from the staggering cost to the taxpayer and particularly the locals who are footing a big chunk of the bill, there is the fact that normal daily life for everyone else who isn't particularly interested is going to get turned on its head for varying periods. How much inconvenience regular people suffer and how much financial loss is incurred by businesses who aren't on the Olympic gravy train remains to be seen, but it's a good bet that both will be substantial, particularly for those who live o
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Then there is the fact that the Olympic authorities have effectively bought laws to protect their "sponsors".
That, specifically, is why I called it the Olympics "scandal" in my original post: at least from what I can see from outside the UK, this whole fiasco is going to cause tremendous damage to the liberties of everyone in or around London (not to mention the enormous inconvenience and loss of revenue), while not many people seem to actually want it. But hey, who cares if it takes a medium-sized country's annual budget and a huge deal of effort to accomplish something few people actually want, if those few peop
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It sounds like we agree on a lot here. I think the basic problem is that the Olympics is assumed to be a long term benefit that justifies the costs (financial and otherwise) and risks inherent in being the host nation. However, the Olympic legacy for past hosts has been, at best, hit and miss, and it's not clear at all that any benefits we might achieve in the long run would have been lost had we told them to shove it when they started buying laws and so on. There is a reality distortion field somewhere aro
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the Typhoons should get to anything fast enough to not need them.
Such as any jet aircraft on the approach to Heathrow that deviate at the last second and start heading to East London, arriving at the Olympic Stadium around two minutes later.
Sure, a Typhoon could cover that distance rather quicker - but allow for the deviation detection, alerting, command and control overheads and other delays, the Typhoon's going to be barely airborne by the time 150,000 litres of high octane fuel are flash roasting 60,000 people.
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The other countries in the UK are mostly insignificant, as England has a far greater population than the rest of them put together. Scotland is certainly #2, but the rest barely count, and are along for the ride. It's sorta like the US and Alaska; sure, they have a lot of land area up there, but they don't have much population (about 500k IIRC), so their opinions don't count for much among the rest of the USA.
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That makes it worse. Rather than being a national policy decided by our elected representatives the Met is just doing it alone. Once they have it up and running all the other forces will want it too and have lots of nice statistics to show how effective it is. We will get it by the backdoor, in both senses of the phrase.
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How cute. An optimist.
I bet, if you live in the UK, you probably also only take an umbrella with you when you leave home in the morning if it's raining right then. Otherwise, you leave it because you want to wait and see what happens.
Seriously, 'waiting to see what happens' rarely works for situations like this [expanding police powers, particularly when they are unchecked], because it is extraordinarily rare for those powers to then be revoked.
It's like copyright law, a one-way street to ever-increasing
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Sure. It's not as if they'd abuse stop and search laws to turn the entirety of London into a designated area forever and then search an order of magnitude more black kids using their dubiously acquired new powers. And the police certainly wouldn't do things like introducing a national number plate scanning system on our trunk road network without any real oversight and then presenting Parliament with a fait accompli. This is England, old boy, where we don't politicise the police force and that sort of thing
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Actually, I a particularly English way, there is a separate force, City of London Police, for the City. But the City is quite small, and apart from St Paul's you'd be lucky to have anything a random outsider to London would consider London in it... Like Big Ben, Buckingham Palace etc... They are covered by the Met. The City Police cover the square mile and not much more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Police [wikipedia.org]
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London is a huge city, and its metro area takes up a sizeable fraction of the country of England (which easily dominates the UK politically). The metro area has 13.7 million people (8.7M in the "urban area" whatever that is, and 7.825M in the city proper (according to Wikipedia)), making it a very large city. According to my calculations, that means London has about 26% of England's population, and 22% of the UK's (showing that the rest of the UK really doesn't matter much compared to England, as England
Hack your phone (Score:5, Funny)
Can they verify the extracted information?
Why yes, I HAVE been on the phone with Barack Obama recently, and YES I REALLY DID receive a phone call from the prime minister, only 15 minutes ago. So why don't you uncuff me and let me go before they call back?
Re:Hack your phone (Score:5, Funny)
Can they verify the extracted information?
Why yes, I HAVE been on the phone with Barack Obama recently, and YES I REALLY DID receive a phone call from the prime minister, only 15 minutes ago. So why don't you uncuff me and let me go before they call back?
Yes, that's working well for Rebekah Brooks.
Re:Hack your phone (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, there are issues of UK police forcing you to hand over the encription keys (they have a legal right to do that in UK). And GSM/mobile network drivers are binary and probably a huge rootkit- your mobile can be forced to run any code by your mobile network operator. And your calls and texts are logged by mobile operators/government anyway. So you won't be able to hide much.
--Coder
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Of course, there are issues of UK police forcing you to hand over the encription keys (they have a legal right to do that in UK).
What would be nice is an encryption setup mode where you have your password/authentication plus 4k of random data (like a big salt). When you set up the encryption or subsequently boot the system decrypted, it regenerates the random data and re-encrypts the internal final decryption key with your password+new random salt. When you shut the phone down normally, the salt is saved in cleartext and you're ready to go upon next boot, but if you yank the battery or shut down in "panic mode", the salt isn't saved
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You will be a sad panda the first time you drop you phone, or it kernel panics, or...
Perhaps better to have a system that will self-wipe the encryption headers on disk if it has been toggled into high paranoia mode and you haven't unlocked it in, say, the last two hours.
Of course, the LUKS based encryption should be fine against attacks even if they got the cipherdata. More likely, you have more to be concerned about wrt your carrier's data they have on your usage. Best first step there is to get a vpn serv
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No, what would be nice is truecrypt for android. Let me give them the password to the plausible deniability section of the phone, while my nefarious uses section stays hidden.
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Police officer: Give me the password to all that scrambled data on your phone.
You: I can't You see, I had it encrypted with a random salt file that is regenerated every time...
Police officer: Don't play hard to get with me, sonny. Give me the password, or you're going to accidentally fall down the stairs a few times.
You: But I can't, when I pulled battery, the keys necessary to decrypt...
Police Officer: You're stubborn, I'll give you that. Well, I'm off to get a cup of coffee for about, ooh, twenty minutes,
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Under the moronic RIPA laws, they'd just throw you in jail for 5 years for being unwilling or unable to decrypt the data (they don't really care if you can or not and you'd struggle to prove that you couldn't).
Or just use Ice cream sandwhich (Score:4, Informative)
ICS has FDE built in, and it is very slick and simple to use.
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Since I never use my phone's data connection, and am so quaint that all I have on it is my phonebook there is mischeif to be had. Easily possible to build a 300V flyback converter inside the case of an extended battery, and use that to provide +/- 300V on alternate output pins on the data connector. I defy the machine to cope with that.
When asked I'll tell them it's a security feature, and knowing the woodentops if you tell them before it won't work that'll make them more determined than ever yo pulg it in
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The UK police don't bother verifying stuff like that, they just arrest you and hope to get something from the interrogation or by searching your person/house/Facebook/Google history.
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Hack your phone.. and install a series of quick-discharge, ultra-high capacity batteries.
Citizen, relinquish your phone! I scan now!
{plug} {zzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZ*pop*}
Using a phone in criminal activity? (Score:2)
As in pretending it's a gun and pointing it at somebody?
How do you know someone is a "suspect"? If there's already some other evidence, however light, that someone is a culprit (such as a witness statement), then fine, arrest him and take the phone, too.
Otherwise, I think this is just one of those circular reasoning things: he's a suspect because there might be incriminating information on his phone. We're checking his phone for incriminating information because he's a suspect. (Oh, and, he's a suspect beca
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How do you know someone is a "suspect"? If there's already some other evidence, however light, that someone is a culprit (such as a witness statement), then fine, arrest him and take the phone, too.
That is how you determine someone is a suspect, you have some amount of evidence that is not enough to prove that the person is guilty of a crime.
Otherwise, I think this is just one of those circular reasoning things: he's a suspect because there might be incriminating information on his phone. We're checking his phone for incriminating information because he's a suspect. (Oh, and, he's a suspect because we suspect there might be incriminating information on his phone.)
No, how do you think a search warrant is issued? There has to be at least some evidence for the police to suspect that someone is involved in criminal activity, hence the term 'suspect' applied to such a person.
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You take one quick look at them and assess whether or not they can pay for high priced lawyers. If they can, you immediately ignore them if they can't then they are suspect (rich vs poor). This really has nothing to do with skin colour apart from the assumption if they are coloured they are poor. How many coloured people in expensive suits did they molest, this is really blatantly all about a two class society rich verses poor and protecting the rich from the poor the rich create in order to exploit.
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Coloured people in expensive suits? You mean gangsters?
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You must live in Texas or somewhere, there are black people in expensive suits that work in my building, racist. I guess you never heard of Bill Cosby or Barack Obama, either.
You should relize that racism is a tool of the rich to keep the poor whites and blacks at each others' throats so they don't wake up and realize who the real enemy is, don't you? No, I guess not; I know a few racists, but they're all knuckle-dragging morons.
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As The Who sang
Substitute your lies for fact
I see right through your plastic mack
I look all white but my dad was black
My Chinese suit is really made out of sack
I this were Israel he would be white, but most mixed race Americans I've known identified themselves as black. Fifty years ago he would have been a "mulatto" but that's probably politically incorrect these days.
He looks black to me. I never saw a white man with hair that curly.
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The police could find someone standing over a dead body spattered in blood holding the hammer that fits the divot marks in the victims head, freely confessing to it and they would *still* be a suspect and no more.
They don't become a culprit, or rather a convict until the courts have had their say. Sadly there are too many coppers in the UK who think they are the law. They are the police - it's the magistrates and judges who are the law.
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You mean because my skin is black or I made a statement to the effect I dislike the government, am anti-war, have some sexual perversion, or similar?
No.
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Well, yeah, that's what I mean.
That is, if someone is found with cocaine, then you arrest him, and you also have/take his phone. That's fine.
What's not fine is the scenario I gave above --infodump someone's phone for no other reason that that there might be something incriminating on it. And in case you're wondering if that happens, yes it does. Remember the /. story on traffic police stopping people at a roadblock and just casually checking everybody's phones?
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There are an awful lot of gun apps....
Just sayin'......
One place where the N900/N9 would shine. (Score:2)
Carry the broken USB port model, and all's well unless the collection device uses a debug port(which requires the battery to be removed to access, also deactivating the SD slot on opening battery cover). In addition, the software stack allows for a lot to be altered, which can discourage people from poking at the data easily.
Maemo/Meego might be considered dead, but it puts the end user in enough control to be ahead of most of this stuff.
That said:
Could the N9's Aegis be used to consider these device probe
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Yeah just FYI the broken USB port model is a PITA. Broke only a few days ago. Nearly made its 2nd birthday. :(
I'd be extremely surprised if a generic phone data extractor supported Maemo.
Probably far too easy to delete on it anyway.
"Whoops I typed the wrong fdisk command because the handcuffs are too tight. Now my phone won't work until I reflash it."
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Or carry a bastardized phone designed by retarded engineers...
I have a Dell Streak, it has a bizzare version of the iphone dock connector, but it's wired differently and if you put in a iphone cable you pretty much blow up the phone.
So my phone has built in anti police search technology!
Thanks moron dell engineers!
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Carry the broken USB port model, and all's well unless the collection device uses a debug port(which requires the battery to be removed to access, also deactivating the SD slot on opening battery cover). In addition, the software stack allows for a lot to be altered, which can discourage people from poking at the data easily.
I see an opportunity for an underground cottage-industry of those with electronics skills that will, for a fee, take a phone and hack it hardware- and software-wise to thwart such government/police snooping.
If nothing else, one could cut/remove the PCB copper traces that connect the data from the chips to the connectors/ports, necessitating a lengthy and expensive trip to an advanced electronics forensic facility for data extraction & decryption. Make the regular use of cellphone "data-slurpers" by LEAs
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Everyday people often choose convinience over security. They forego data encryption, they have simple passwords, and they don't think twice about their privacy implications.
Criminals are often no different.
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Everyday people often choose convinience over security. They forego data encryption, they have simple passwords, and they don't think twice about their privacy implications.
Criminals are often no different.
Of course, that's currently true. It will likely remain mostly true, even with the growing levels and abuse of government monitoring.
However, there *will* be some increase in the numbers of people...both criminals and others who are not criminals...who will become more security-aware because of increased intrusions and abuses, as well as the increased likelihood that they or someone they know has been personally negatively affected. I've seen two examples personally. I have two acquaintances who, each in di
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Well, the screen resolution is barely adequate, the CPU struggles on many web pages, the battery life could definitely do with improvement, the operating system is a bit clumsy, the software support very poor relative to other mobile OS and the upgrade path non-existent.
Hell, I used mine for two years (without breaking the USB connector) and didn't recommend it to a single person. I've recommended my current phone to several people and it doesn't even have a hardware keyboard :(
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Well, the screen resolution is barely adequate, the CPU struggles on many web pages, the battery life could definitely do with improvement, the operating system is a bit clumsy, the software support very poor relative to other mobile OS and the upgrade path non-existent.
On those problems:
CPU: Overclocking can fix that.
Battery: Double-size batteries do exist for the N900, extending the lifetime to a more friendly 8 hours.
Software Support: CSSU, since it does a lot better than the N770/N8x0 days where neither had it.
Upgrade path: The N9, or thank Elop for removing the possibility for future Meego models.
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Overclocking the CPU still leaves it slower than the stock CPU in my current phone, and doesn't help battery life at all. And making the device too big to dot in my pocket isn't the answer there - plenty of portable devices needing a bag are significantly better than the N900.
I don't regret buying/owning one, I still have it, but it never had the chance. That form factor and build quality with a more modern screen (even 3 years has seen a significant improvement) and a properly supported OS would still attr
Being a mass-market phone. (Score:2)
Unlike the phones of its time (2009), it was not a mass-market phone. It is a multitool for communications, as pre-Elop Nokia engineered & built them.
It was more open than Android, it was too unfriendly towards carriers, had features that were ahead of others(hardware keyboard, 32GB flash + SD slot), had integrated communications frameworks for various network types.
The case where I'd recommend an N900 is if one already has one - for there is no replacement that matches it in openness, form-factor, or
Ban Travel To The UK? (Score:1)
Sounds like the UK ought to added to the US State Department list of "unfriendly countries" where travel by US citizens is discouraged.
Wait a minute, if the US State Department did that then US citizens would have no "friendly countries" in the world to visit.
Officer, that looks suspiciously like... (Score:1)
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need a kill gesture (Score:5, Interesting)
We need a kill gesture. Some way to immediately block access to the phone's info while the phone corrupts its information beyond readability. No signing in with a login code, just do *this* sequence of key presses or gestures, and the phone initiates its info-apoptosis. Why isn't there an app for this?
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Just encrypted the device and have a background process that wipes the encryption key and triggers a kernel panic the moment one of these police scanning devices is plugged in.
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We need a kill gesture. Some way to immediately block access to the phone's info while the phone corrupts its information beyond readability. No signing in with a login code, just do *this* sequence of key presses or gestures, and the phone initiates its info-apoptosis. Why isn't there an app for this?
Do you really want an app that can wipe your phone? I'd hate to be a beta-tester.
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Do you really want an app that can wipe your phone? I'd hate to be a beta-tester.
Aptitude has this neat feature, "-s" (simulate), where it goes through the motions of what it's going to do, reporting them all but not actually doing anything. Not that difficult.
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Do you really want an app that can wipe your phone? I'd hate to be a beta-tester.
Aptitude has this neat feature, "-s" (simulate), where it goes through the motions of what it's going to do, reporting them all but not actually doing anything. Not that difficult.
I'm talking about verification.
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Do you really want an app that can wipe your phone? I'd hate to be a beta-tester.
Aptitude has this neat feature, "-s" (simulate), where it goes through the motions of what it's going to do, reporting them all but not actually doing anything. Not that difficult.
I'm talking about verification.
Explain? If after running the app your data's not there, ...
Still, it might be a lot simpler to just image your phone when you first get it, then panic mode slaps that image over the current image and reboots. You're now back to a vanilla, never used, phone with no "incriminating" data. May be better to add a few innocuous entries before taking the image to make it look less like it was just re-imaged.
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Do you really want an app that can wipe your phone? I'd hate to be a beta-tester.
Aptitude has this neat feature, "-s" (simulate), where it goes through the motions of what it's going to do, reporting them all but not actually doing anything. Not that difficult.
I'm talking about verification.
Explain? If after running the app your data's not there, ...
Still, it might be a lot simpler to just image your phone when you first get it, then panic mode slaps that image over the current image and reboots. You're now back to a vanilla, never used, phone with no "incriminating" data. May be better to add a few innocuous entries before taking the image to make it look less like it was just re-imaged.
My point is that if you have an app that can wipe your data, you sure don't want a bug in that app that might do the wipe when you don't want it to. The app needs to have some pretty global-thermonuclear-war-level permissions that I'm not sure I'd trust any developer to have.
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You have one. Take the phone in both hands and smack it as hard as you can over the nearest hard object edge, in a motion trying to break it in 1/2.
Guarantee they will not recover any data from a phone you snapped the circuit board and smushed the battery so it started burning. But I also guarantee you will spend a few days in prison over the action. In the USA that action gets you waterboarded.
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Anyway, I don't really understand wh
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The resulting battery fire will take out that sd card.
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I wish for encryption with a selection of input methods and a variable lenght password.
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You can use the pass code erase feature on the iphone. Type ten wrong codes fast and all is gone.
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You can use the pass code erase feature on the iphone. Type ten wrong codes fast and all is gone.
The iPhone makes you wait for a long time after some incorrect attempts, so it's impossible to quickly wipe it like that.
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Because it's basically a dumb idea. If you're going to go to the trouble to bother making phones become instantly secure upon command, you might as well just make them secure by default, instead.
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Keep the phone in your trouser pocket. When stopped by the police immediately piss yourself (remember to keep your bladder full just in case) and "water" damage will kill it. Might be able to throw an intimidation charge at the cops too.
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Why isn't there an app for this?
There was, until the guy successfully tested it.
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What the fuck makes you think the police will only use this device when the owner's committed a crime?
This is the Met we're talking about. A police force that thinks pre-emptive false imprisonment is for the public good, that needs media attention before it'll even investigate racism by its officers, that promotes the fucking bitch overseeing the murder of an innocent Brazilian, that lies to the media, that sells information to the media and that happily kicks shit out of British citizens because they dared
Encryption (Score:1)
In the Last few weeks wtf is happening (Score:5, Interesting)
Now we have the police stating they will rip a copy of your phone and we all know this will happen for the most minimal event. Get pulled over for speeding, "let me check you phone" your data will be pulled, all your contacts, all your images (with EXIF info because you would not have had time to clear it (EXIF can hold GPS data about where the photo was taken)) and it’s all going to be logged (did you know the UK police are only meant to keep your finger prints for a set time if you are not charged, to day this database has never once been trimmed
A few months ago I would have said the UK is in serious trouble, I think it’s become fcuked in a very short space of time, there is no national sprit, the unemployed are restless with no hope, my generation is being r@ped for every pounds the government can get to support an aging population. I have had to stop driving because the cost of petrol is so high; my food bills have gone up 20-25% in a year. My wages are not going up but the middle class tories just tell everyone it’s time to tighten your belts. I have nothing left to tighten. I am just under 30, only a few of my friends are on the housing market, the ones that are have all had help from their parents or grandparents. I do not know one person my age that went to uni and is now in a position to afford a house in the UK without the help of someone else (caste system take 2, you don’t have to do the job of your parent but you better hope they can support you while you find your profession). Funny stat i read yesterday, in the 1960s you could buy a house for 1.5 times the min annual salary, today that number is now 6-7 times the minwage in the UK. At this rate I will never own a house, I can barely afford to drive anywhere, and i am going to spend my whole life paying for a country that spent the money before I was even really in the job market. I mean i was at school and uni while labour was pushing billions in to the public sector to improve their stats. and now why am I paying for it? why were my parents giving a chance yet I am forced to work to pay for others errors.
omg this is just a rant
Finally I want to say one thing, I want to introduce a tax system based on ag
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10 But don't worry!
20 The other political party will promise to undo/block all that nasty surveillance/snooping if you vote them into power.
30 And then, when they get into power, they will change their minds and come up with something worse.
40 Goto 10
Basic politics in a Western 'Democracy'.
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Now as for housing, have you considered talking to your local council? One potential upshot I've found out is that the government offers low-cost and "first-time buyers" housing. In my case I can get 60% off the value of a house, putting it at 3-4x my salary, which I actually have a shot at affording.
Lucky you. Unfortunately for me I'm a single white man with no children, which means my council considers me a cash cow.
The only people that can buy discounted housing are people living in council housing (or its housing association replacement). I'd have to change sex and adopt an Ethiopian before they'd give me a council house.
lol terrorism? (Score:1)
where the hell is all this terrorism that they need to stop? Soooooo ONE time a few guys flew some planes into some buildings... about 3000 died... tsunamis and earthquakes kill over 10000 people at a time.
Now that we have signed away all of our freedoms, the "terrorists" have officially won.
The true terrorists are the assholes who run our governments.
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There are terrorists hiding behind every bush in your neighborhood, waiting to go through your wifes panties.
They hide everywhere, just waiting for you to turn your back. Hurry! give up your rights so mother government can protect you!
Openmoko (Score:2, Informative)
Little Brother ftw (Score:1)
This is exactly why we need a full linux on our phones. I want dmcrypt, I want ssh (ok, already there), I want TrueCrypt.
Virus vault (Score:1)
The police are using windows base computers so just put a virus vault on your SD card and watch the fun began.
Protests (Score:2)
I suspect that one of the main uses of this will be at protests. By extracting cell phone data from protesters, and you can predict future protests as well as find all sorts of data to discredit the protesters.
Jedi mind tricks (Score:2)
iPhone to the rescue (Score:2)
Believe it or not, Apple has a defense against this built in to iOS 5.
The automated "read a suspect's cellphone tools" I've heard of work by performing a tethered jailbreak. After executing the jailbreak logic, they read the memory containing the security key, and brute force the simple 4 digit PIN, which then grants full access to the machine. The process takes from a few seconds to a few minutes.
The fix is to go into Settings / General / Passcode lock, and turn "Simple Passcode" to Off. Set a passcode
My contacts (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
To be gunned down in my house by the cops, when they come looking for me.
So I'll gladly give up all my rights, and betray the American way.
'Cause there ain't no doubt I don't wanna die, that's why I will obey.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I know you're making with the funnies, but yes, they do use these things, problem with using then is Ofcom's monitoring will flag them up for further investigation (encrypted transmissions being somewhat illegal in the UK).
Real Criminals in the UK use cheap PAYG mobile phones, as you can purchase them without having to provide any sort of ID (and they're smart enough to have other people to purchase them to avoid the old 'look-sir-we-have-you-on-camera-buying-a-phone-where-is-it?' questions if they're the s
Re: (Score:2)
(encrypted transmissions being somewhat illegal in the UK)
You do realise that GSM is encrypted?