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Drive-By Shooting Suspect Remotely Wipes iPhone X, Catches Extra Charges (appleinsider.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Apple Insider: A woman from Schenectady, N.Y. accused of being the driver in a shooting used Apple's remote wipe feature to destroy evidence on her iPhone X that might have been related to the event. The iPhone was seized as evidence in the case, but police say that shortly after she triggered the remote wipe, an option available via Find My iPhone in iCloud. Normally the tool is intended for people with lost or stolen devices. The suspected driver, Juelle Grant, was arrested on November 2nd and charged with two counts of tampering with physical evidence, and one count of hindering prosecution. As Apple Insider notes, only one of the tampering counts is connected to the iPhone.
I'm surprised (I probably shouldn't be) that the police do not have some system in place so that these phones are cut off from communicating with anything once they have them. I'd have to think that a tampering charge is less than a murder charge.
--
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. -- Winston Churchill
Seriously? How about refusing to give up the encryption key - would that count as tampering with physical evidence? They're effectively the same thing.
How about a one-way drop box on police cars that's a Faraday cage, grounded to the car's chassis with a lock that only management can open. Should prevent phones from being wiped, and preserve the chain of evidence -- if a body cam shows the phone being dropped into the secure box and the box is only opened in the presence of two people, it would reduce the risk of accusations of evidence tampering. Better yet, design the box to be sent directly to a trustworthy lab equipped with a Faraday cage where they can work on the phone. (i.e. PD can only put the phone in, they can't unlock it at all).
Uh, how can they charge her with obstructing anything when they a) don't know what was on the phone and b) had any assurance they could even access they phone (especially as TFA notes that they were so clueless that they didn't toss it in a Faraday bag). There may or may not have been evidence.
This all part of the game, and this round went to the bad guys.
Faraday cages require a ground, i.e. they are not portable. But there should be some way of blocking radio reception. In our Faraday cage at work, I was still able to communicate with WiFi routers outside the cage; they are not perfect.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I get where you are going with the one-way cage but in reality I'd be more worried about people remote-wiping seized devices that police tampering, so a more practical thing for every police car to carry would be faraday bags with wire mesh embedded in them - I used to see them for sale on Amazon, but the last I looked I couldn't find them. Seems like it could be made cheap enough for every police car to have a few on hand in case they needed to hold a phone for evidence and prevent any remote tampering.
You could have the bags come with a fairly tamper-proof seal that would work almost as well as the one way cage to ensure devices were not tampered with between seizure and lab work. Don't they already have similar things for evidence bags for normal stuff?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd also have to think that you can't prove in court who did it
Not really. IRL something like 98% of cases are plea-bargained, so generally you don't have to prove a damn thing.
That is incorrect. Faraday cages do not require a ground and can be very portable.
A simple roll of aluminum foil would work. Just tear off a large sheet, wrap it around the phone and crimp the edges with your fingers. Done!
The aluminum foil would be quite effective at blocking the RF signals going to and from the phone, and it would also detune the phone's internal antennas, increasing the effectiveness even more.
It seems like at least someone has a faraday bag for phones now
I've thought about getting one myself for a while now, in the case of a Carrington event or EMP, just to keep spare phones in I would have around anyway.
I have no idea if that one is any good, just the first one I found that looked promising.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, just put my phone in microwave, it didn't lose either cell or wifi signal. Signal strength went down some, but still played youtube for a couple minutes just fine.
IANAL, but i'm pretty sure tampering with potential evidence is obstruction even if they can't prove there was anything incriminating in the evidence in the same way that police searching without a warrant/probable cause invalidates actual incriminating evidence, even if they argue that they would eventually have found that same evidence via legal means.
Basically the people who write the laws aren't _completely_ braindead. If the burden of proof were the other way around all potential suspects would always destroy all potential evidence, even after being indicted and while in full view of officials, and all police would always search you without a warrant and then back off and wait for a warrant if they actually found something that looked like it might be incriminating. (And one or both of those things still obviously happens quite a lot anyways, but at least there's some legal recourse this way.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
well that's yet another way to destroy evidence, right?
what if your wipe key is lawyer vs attorney and when asking you to open your phone some says I want my attorney and then the phone wipes it self?
Also, tin foil doesn't work. A box lined with steel wool might be a cheep way to go. A microwave oven with the door closed also would work
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety --haven't done any research though. There is a kindof urban legend I've heard here from the days of wifi B and G that congested home routers sometimes drop connections whenever someone's zapping food in the nearby ovens.
More personally, owning recent tech shows motive for worry whenever I walk by an active set (2 different brands thru the years) while listening to various bluetooth devices (headphones, speakers). My audio playback starts stuttering till I walk away. So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Of course you'll have to call it a " security " or " privacy protection " app before Apple would even consider such a thing on the App Store.
Make sure to think of a catchy name for it. . . .
Conditions:
1) User has not logged into phone in $user_defined number of hours ( user is detained )
2) No signal ( cellular or wifi ) present ( phone is in a signal denied environment )
3) User has the paranoid feature enabled
#2 is fun because they have to choose to either leave the phone connected to a network ( risking a remote wipe ) or denying the connection and running the risk of the phone wiping itself. Decisions, decisions . . . . . .
User selectable payloads:
a) Phone wipes itself
b) Phone rekeys with a random password ( user plausible deniability - I really don't know the password )
c) Phone overwrites data with random gibberish or lyrics from your favorite anti-police music ( NWA can help you out here )
If you're the forgetful criminal type, you can always add a setting to flash a warning, beep, vibrate, whatever telling you bad things are about to happen to your phone if you don't log into it soon.
Done.
Or you could, you know, leave your damn phone at home if you plan on doing something stupid. . . . . .
( # 2 answer right behind don't do anything stupid to begin with )
*afterthought*
This whole " they-might-wipe-the-phone-remotely-so-put-it-in-a-shielded-bag-or-faraday cage " thing wouldn't be an issue if there was a user removable battery in these things.
Just sayin . . . .
You're describing a deadman switch. Courts will probably respond with "lol nah fuck you" directly, but if you pitch said justice through a lawyer with a murika-appropriate price tag, it can hold water.
Much like website canaries, these are workarounds that accomplish the exact same end result (ie wipe a device, announce a court order) but steps around weird, subjective, exploitable "intent" verbiage.
I've imagined a novel type of access control on the idea. A court says the law is forcing you to divulge a password, you MUST remember and provide it, but it automatically mailed itself to a random recipient. With instructions to not contact you until the Unexpected Duress has passed. You are literally incapable of furnishing the password, whether you're being tortured by a $5 wrench or a tantrum-throwing legal system.
Intent tends to live a few houses down from the laughably tangled spaghetti of thoughtcrime, and the same-result silliness behind these indemnifications is evidence of that.
Parent is correct. I can confirm 5G does not penetrate my aluminum hat.
True story. So at the time wife and I were expecting our first baby, she imported from China some maternity clothing designed to block harmful background RF. It was marketing BS for sure. But, it did work! As I laughed at her for wasting money on this expensive clothing, I tested it with a phone call (speaker mode) and immediately threw the garment over the phone. From four bars to dropped call!!!
Apparently that shit does work.
Yeah, just put my phone in microwave, it didn't lose either cell or wifi signal. Signal strength went down some, but still played youtube for a couple minutes just fine.
You forgot to turn on the microwave.
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety
Because the general public has no idea how microwave ovens work, or what microwave radiation does to humans. It's just a magic box that makes food hot, and probably doesn't kill the operator too quickly.
The size and shape of the oven is actually important. The microwaves bounce around inside, and produce standing waves. If you disable the motor on an oven (or put an upside-down plate over the spinning hub), and heat a large chocolate bar, you'll see some places get hot quickly (at the antinodes of the standing waves), and other places stay cool (where the reflecting waves aren't reinforcing each other). The motor acts to move food around through the hot spots, to more evenly expose the food to the high points of radiation.
Now about that radiation... It's really just a really bright light at a particular "color" (like all electromagnetic waves). It's in the 2.45 GHz range, just like 802.11 WiFi and Bluetooth signals. At that frequency, it makes molecules a bit more active, especially water molecules. It's not energetic enough to move atoms or electrons, so it won't change your DNA or cause cancer, but water will absorb microwave energy very nicely. Notably, that includes all the water just under your skin, so there's almost no radiation getting through more than about 17 millimeters of tissue.
Yes, that means that if your oven's shielding isn't particularly good, you will actually get "cooked" if you stand close to it... but because you aren't inside the oven, the microwaves aren't reinforcing each other, so there aren't any of those "hot spots" that actually cause significant heating. Essentially, you're getting hit with radiation, but usually not enough, and in too small of an area to matter (unless you do something particularly hazardous, like stand in front of a high-power microwave transmitter).
In short, it doesn't matter much if your microwave oven is a little leaky. It might disrupt WiFi and Bluetooth a bit, but it won't cause any more harm than eating a few bananas... the radiation from those will actually be inside you, passing right by your vital organs! However, you do still want your oven to leak as little radiation as possible, but for a different reason: any energy that escapes the oven isn't going to be heating your food.
So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Yep.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This, actually, is exactly what remote wipe was invented for: To prevent your data falling into the wrong hands, with you deciding who "wrong hands" are or better: Not having to decide but simply being able to wipe whenever you want.
The police should really be able to anticipate this. What you can't take the SIM card out? While they will probably successfully sue for destruction of evidence (because it is), let's not for one second pretend that this is not exactly the use case of the feature.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If your small faraday cage is perfect and infinitely conductive, it will work perfectly. If is reasonably well constructed and fairly conductive, it will work well enough.
I suspect real world behavior for such shields is more complex than the simple high school physics model, and that the device inside is less than perfectly shielded. The shield in a shielded cable can be thought of as an imperfect Faraday cage, and depending on application it may not require grounding or it may need to be grounded at one or both ends.
In any event grounding never hurts and in practice sometimes it helps.
The idea that grounding is mandatory may come from preppers building room sized Faraday cages so their stuff survives a post EMP apocalypse. Not only is such a large build likely to have numerous imperfections, in some situations the cage and it's contents can acquire a large static charge relative to ground.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not only is it marketing BS, it can actually be worse than not using those clothes. Unless you wrap your baby entirely in those clothes from head to toe, it could act as a parabolic dish concentrating the signal to certain parts of the body or bouncing it many times through the body before the energy dissipates instead of travelling through the body once..
When going into an environment where it might be helpful not to have information on one's phone fall into the wrong hands, a phone that would lobotomize itself if certain conditions weren't met would be very nice to have.
If there isn't already an app for that, there should be.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Same for me. My phone works fine in the microwave with the door shut. However, wrapping it in tin foil did block the signal.
So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Yes and no. I recall reading somewhere that the ovens are allowed to leak up to one watt of power. Compare that to the power of WiFi or Bluetooth at milliwatts and that's a lot of noise for the signal to go through. If you have a 1200 watt microwave oven and 1 watt leaks out then that's doing pretty good to keep most of that energy in, so "poorly shielded" may not apply on that grounds. Having the oven overwhelm your Bluetooth though may make this seem quite a bit of a leak.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Haha. We made him type this.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Faraday cages require a ground, i.e. they are not portable. But there should be some way of blocking radio reception. In our Faraday cage at work, I was still able to communicate with WiFi routers outside the cage; they are not perfect.
It depends on what you are doing. If your goal is to block a radio signal you don't need to ground a faraday cage. If your goal is to protect people or equipment including from the faraday cage itself then it should be grounded to avoid a charge building up on it or currents flowing through it when you touch it.
When someone who you do not want to have your phone information is in possession of your phone, you can wipe it. Sounds like pretty much what the idea behind the feature was.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Assuming you have a rooted Android phone you can probably accomplish that with Tasker.
There is a kindof urban legend I've heard here from the days of wifi B and G that congested home routers sometimes drop connections whenever someone's zapping food in the nearby ovens.
It's not an urban legend, and it's not just B and G; my original Chromecast operated on the 2.4 ghz band, and it would stop playing movies every time I went to nuke some popcorn. Kinda handy actually; didn't have to bother hitting pause. Started right up again as soon as the popcorn was done.
The phone was seized but left connected to the cellular network, allowing anyone who had access, to wipe the phone. The correct procedure, even if it's not official, would be to cut off all network access from the phone, so that no one or no service can access it. The fact the police didn't make this common sense move, should make them liable for the tampering and not the person who wiped it.
If they don't know what was on her phone, how do they know there was evidence of a crime?
Saw a shop in Florida that sold RF-proof undergarments. The only thing it accomplishes is proving that there are too many dumb people with too much money.
Yes and no... the microwave is about as likely to cause cancer as repeated rug burn or noogies even if it is going to raise your likelihood of cancer beyond that of standing silently in a dark room instead. Safely ignored, standing by the grill would be more hazardous.
Kinda handy actually; didn't have to bother hitting pause
Thanks for the confirmation and the additional anecdote. In hindsight, a better term than "urban legend" would have been more adequate for my GP comment. I haven't experienced it myself, but can think of "known issue"... unfortunately I've been lurking lots on Hackernews and sub-consciously avoided what there would have been a sure-fire citation-needed reply :)
I laughed at the happy note on your workflow. It reminds me of what happens when software fixes this kind of thing in an un-skippable update. Couldn't find the exact XKCD I had in mind but this one is funny too https://xkcd.com/1172/
Thank you for the informative reply and presenting sources, Sarten-X. It's nice to continue seeing the banana-related measurements.
They pop up in tech circles often, and I like propagating knowledge of the handy XKCD chart at https://xkcd.com/radiation/
On a closer look after posting, I think that was the right xkcd link all along.
There are methods to use a password which is too long to remember. They come down to storing the password in a physical form which if accessed improperly is destroyed or plausibly destroyed like a deck of cards, stack of bills, or set of code books.
Of course it is inconvenient if you can only unlock your phone once at the beginning of the day and the court may not care but at least it gives you a chance to establish plausible deniability. It would be more suitable to a fully encrypted file server, workstation, or desktop.
A microwave oven with the door closed also would work, and no you don't need to plug it in, and you might not like what happens if you turned it on.
A 900MHz microwave oven which uses finger stock to seal the door seam against RF would work great but they are long obsolete because the exposed and fragile finger stock along the inside of the door was easily damaged allowing leakage. This is a shame because they heated food more effectively than higher frequency ovens.
2.4 GHz microwave ovens use a choke ring folded into the door which is why the doors are so thick but the choke ring only works over a narrow frequency range and to a lessor extent its odd harmonics. Outside of that, the seam in the door acts as a slot antenna preventing good attenuation.
A small bag made of continuous metal mesh (Faraday bag?) with a conductive seam would work great though. The various metalized plastic bags I have tried have been hit or miss and not as effective but someone undoubtedly makes one which is suitable.
Tin Foil doesn't, but Copper Tape does wonders. From GPS to Cell to everything else, line a box with it and you're golden (its a staple at work for "no signal" tests).
The problem whether tin, aluminum, or copper foil is used is the seam which acts as a slot antenna. This is especially a problem with aluminum because of its durable insulating oxide.
RF shielding enclosures often use conductive finger stock or braid to bridge across seams limiting the size of any inadvertent slot antenna.
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety --haven't done any research though. There is a kindof urban legend I've heard here from the days of wifi B and G that congested home routers sometimes drop connections whenever someone's zapping food in the nearby ovens.
The level of leakage needed to interfere with 2.4 GHz WiFi is very low compared to the level needed to become a safety hazard.
The spectrum analyser function of a Ubiquiti access point can easily see the distinctive leakage from a microwave over at a considerable distance. They really trash the whole 2.4 GHz band.
The ISM bands were intended for applications where there was really no alternative to allowing high levels of leakage which make communication applications unreliable. If this is unacceptable for your product, then a different spectrum allocation is needed.
More personally, owning recent tech shows motive for worry whenever I walk by an active set (2 different brands thru the years) while listening to various bluetooth devices (headphones, speakers). My audio playback starts stuttering till I walk away. So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
It is pretty much an impossible problem; the choke ring used to shield the door seam has a finite attenuation so there is always a minimum level of leakage. 900 MHz microwave ovens used finger stock (a 900 MHz choke ring would be too large) which would work much better however the finger stock is fragile and prone to damage compromising its performance which is why 900 MHz microwave ovens are no longer in use.