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Originally Posted by kizzy
(Post 5143993)
They will not be interested in joe bloggs phone or his sext to his bit on the side...It will be those suspected of certain crimes, terrorism..Trafficking..
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Nope, ANY crime :
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Last year, the National Policing Improvement Agency placed mobile phone evidence in the top tier of training requirements for officers, teaching them how to secure evidence gleaned from handsets, with 3,500 officers a year expected to take the course.
The police and private forensic experts have no compunction about unlocking the secrets stored in smartphones
On top of in-house expertise, a huge number of handsets are sent to forensic specialists for analysis to discover where they’ve been and what they contain. “From what we see, 18 months or two years ago the proportion of smartphones we were seeing compared to PCs was very small,” said Phil Ridley, a mobile phone analyst with CCL-Forensics. “Now it’s well over half the devices that we see. We see both prosecution and defence – as well as private cases.”
Your smartphone could place you at the scene of a crime, destroy an alibi or maybe even provide one – which is why one of the first things police now do at the scene of a crime is take away a suspect’s mobile. “There’s so much in there,” said Ridley. “Pictures, notations, communications records, location information from cell records and Wi-Fi. You have navigation information in there from satnav software – the list goes on.”
With so much potentially incriminating evidence available to the police, you might think that there would be privacy protection in place to stop authorities probing your handset – but you’d be wrong. According to legal experts, police have wide-ranging powers to search mobile phones providing they have a “reasonable suspicion” that a crime may have been committed. Once inside a handset, they could well stumble across other evidence, which could also be used in court.
“The baseline rule has to be that there is a reasonable suspicion that an offence has been committed for a phone to be inspected and to do an on-the-spot search,” said Tracey Stretton, legal consultant for data-recovery specialist Kroll Ontrack. “If you see a man after a car accident, you wouldn’t need a warrant because you could have a reasonable suspicion that a traffic offence had been committed.
“If you’re looking into one crime and find something else on the phone, then I guess the police would follow that line of inquiry. They wouldn’t stop to get a warrant because they now have suspicion of a further offence.”
According to analysts, the police are also instructed to take the SIMs out of phones upon seizure to ensure suspects can’t call the phone and remotely wipe data or delete incriminating images. The standard operating procedure is evolving, but if any information is stored in a handset it may be used as evidence against you.
“Location information is prime, for both the prosecution and the defence. If you can prove that someone was at a particular location that’s very important,” said Ridley. “If a handset has GPS, then the information stored on the device is more accurate than using cell tower information, which has been used for some time. A lot of people will use GPS, and that information also includes a time stamp, so you can say with a high degree of accuracy that at this time he was here.”
The phone can not only locate where you have been but also what you were doing at the time, which is how the police can tell if a motorist was making a call at the time of a crash.
So much information leaks off the handset and onto third-party hardware that it’s almost impossible to lock down potentially incriminating data.
“If we’re talking smartphones, most would be synced to a central server,” said Robert Winter, chief engineer at Kroll Ontrack. “If you have deleted data on your mobile device, there should be a copy of a file or message on your sync server, whether that’s from your IT department if you’re a BlackBerry user, or you’re syncing an iPhone through iTunes, which should hold a backup of the actual data.”
Messages are routinely used as evidence that a suspect has organised
a drugs drop or been involved in a conspiracy. Ripley’s company has also been involved in cases where either authorities or employers wanted to know when someone had been making VoIP calls.
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What the police can learn from your smartphone | Security | Features | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/3686...#ixzz1vGI6FxOj |
