Mobile 'Remote Wipe' Thwarts Secret Service

bennyboy64 writes "Smartphones that offer the ability to 'remote wipe' are great for when your device goes missing and you want to delete your data so that someone else can't look at it, but not so great for the United States Secret Service, ZDNet reports. The ability to 'remote wipe' some smartphones such as BlackBerry and iPhone was causing havoc for law enforcement agencies, according to USSS special agent Andy Kearns, speaking on mobile phone forensics at a security conference in Australia."

Comments

Aww..

[Jaysyn]

My heart bleeds for these guys. Really, it does.

Re:Aww..

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, if they're too stoopid to turn off the phone, how do they expect to catch a master kriminal?

Re:Aww..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Umm... Because it suggests that the phones (though not the networks) aren't backdoored?

The fact that the Secret Service, who ought to be a bit sharper than Joe Beat Cop, haven't mastered the art of "turning the phone off before it gets wiped" doesn't strike me as a good thing. However, the fact that "wipe" means "wipe" not "Wipe, unless the state says otherwise" does.

Re:Aww..

[daid303]

I might have been playing to much Commandos, The Saboteur, Wolvenstein and Day of Defeat. But when you say S.S. I think about a whole different kind of 'cop'.

Scary enough, you see them the same way as the original S.S. was seen by the public many years ago.

Re:Aww..

[palegray.net]

It's okay. Hopefully they'll still have plenty of information from tapping phone calls that were already placed.

Re:Aww..

[Mister Whirly]

Right, becasue everyone knows that mistakes are never made by law enforcement.

I mean if you don't have anything to hide, why should anyone be worried?

Re:Aww..

[Lumpy]

To me it highlights how much bumbling idiots these guys are. If you have a phone that you NEED the evidence inside it, the second you get it you wrap that thing in several layers of tinfoil and take it directly to a faraday cage workspace to start the process. Honestly, this should have been standard practice for ANY phone over the past 10 years.

Dont they teach these guys anything?

Re:Aww..

[commodore64_love]

>>>Frankly, I give a shit if the S.S. can read the information on my phone if they detain me. First, in order for me to be detained by the S.S., I'd have to be in a pretty precarious situation in the first place.

Yeah. After all the government never, never arrests innocent people and throws them in jail to rot. So you're right. Nothing to fear.

/end sarcasm

Here's an interesting case where government cops entered the wrong house (therefore an illegal warrantless search) to do a drug raid. Of course there were no drugs at the address (again: wrong house), but the man inside was scared to death so he ran to his bedroom and hid for fear of his life. When the intruders entered, he acted in self-defense of his life and killed the intruder. Then he was charged with murder and sentenced to life for murder.

That man is completely innocent, but nobody seems to give two shits. He's already spent a decade in jail. It could have just as easily been you.

http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/the-case-of-cory-maye

Re:Aww..

[element-o.p.]

If you want to trust the government like that then fine, but you are a minority in this respect.

Unfortunately, I doubt he is.

Re:Aww..

[ehrichweiss]

And to make matters worse, if the police raided your home and killed you and your family "by accident", they'd be all like "oops, my bad" and that'd be the last you'd hear of it. Try to defend yourself and you're committing some form of crime whether that be murder or "obstruction of justice"..

Re:Aww..

[geekoid]

" I'd have to be in a pretty precarious situation in the first place.

in thir view, yes. Not necessarily true in reality. It does give them a way to go hunting for indicators of other crimes. Not crimes, just some pre set 'indicator'

for example:
if the believed 13% of people who visits X site commit y crime, and you happened to have been to that site, they will detain you. Even if it has nothing to do with why they have the phone.

" The reality is, the S.S. doesn't give a damn about the average person. T"

And that's the problem.

" They're concerned with counterfeiters and threats to dignitaries and the President. "

really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service

Imagine if that was today. They would have taken a record of every person the called, and then investigate all those people.

Do you need to actually live in a fascist state before you get it?
Talk to people who lived in the soviet union during the 70s. All that was done under the guise of making people safer and catching 'bad guys'.

You need to stop living under the pretense that only guilty people get investigated.

Hm

[pudge]

The Secret Service just need a Faraday Cage Fanny Pack.

Re:Hm

[jimicus]

No it doesn't. It requires a simple, mindless process: supply all agents with shielded bags for mobile phones, instruct them that the process for mobile phone evidence is it goes in the special bag and does not come out before it gets to the lab.

And if there's one thing most law enforcement agencies worldwide are extremely good at, it's simple mindless processes.

Gist of the story

[thesaurus]

If officers don't follow evidence procedures correctly, evidence gets screwed up. And it doesn't happen very often.

"Sometimes you'll get a cellphone that comes in that is wiped, [but] it's not all that common," he said. Agents were trained to incapacitate devices, but Kearns cautioned that not all enforcement agencies had the same knowledge.

Re:Gist of the story

[oldspewey]

So basically, this is crime scene preservation training 101. If an officer stumbles around a physical murder scene, eating hot chicken wings, randomly picking up pieces of evidence, and leaving delicious buffalo sauce all over everything, he will destroy the physical evidence before it can be expertly analyzed. But hopefully with adequate training, he learns how to take adequate precautions.

Re:Gist of the story

[torgis]

Sounds like a sinfully delicious crime.

Re:Gist of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference would be that to avoid getting buffalo sauce over everything, the officer just has to not touch anything at the scene. With the phone, the officer needs to disable the wireless so that the data remains intact. If the officer reverts to the "secure the crime scene and don't touch anything" strategy, the phone's owner can remotely wipe incriminating evidence from the phone before investigators can examine it.

from the cry-them-a-river dept.

[syrinx]

So the Slashdot groupthink's anti-law enforcement stance has extended to the Secret Service now? Which part are we in favor of: counterfeiting money or assassinating the president? Personally I'll go ahead and take a bold anti-counterfeiting/anti-assassination position and say that this is a bad thing.

Re:from the cry-them-a-river dept.

[bzzfzz]

I think most Slashdotters will agree that the Service is well within their rights to perform forensic analysis on any device that they obtain during a lawful search, whether conducted under a warrant, incidental to an arrest, or based on probable cause. I do not believe that the Service suffers a poor track record regarding extralegal searches as does INS and some other agencies.

On the other hand, the availability of an effective "remote wipe" of a personal device is a rightful means of exercising freedom.

It's about balance.

Re:From the Red Herring department

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure most people are not trying to secure their phones or devices against the Secret Service.

The main reason almost everyone I know who turns on encryption is wanting to protect themselves against thieves. Not NATO. Not the Secret Service. Not the FBI. No individual company wants to have a hardware theft turn into a hardware + data theft, which turns the cost from the few thousands for the hardware to running in the millions if the data that was stolen was crucial, or could lead to ID thefts. Extortion is already common, so having device and computer encryption is a must.

In fact, *not* encrypting devices and laptops may actually run businesses afoul of the law, especially if there is any personal data on the laptop present. Look at all the havoc caused by USB flash drives ending up lost on a park bench, or left in the break-room by the Vend-a-Goat machine.