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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
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).
There is a big difference between tampering with evidence and being required to assist in your own conviction...
There is a thing called a Constitution and the right against self incrimination, maybe you have heard of it?
I think it's one of those "we're gonna charge you, and you can fight it; but you'll get the maximum penalty -- OR you can fess up and we'll give you 5 years and probation" type shake-downs.
And definitely, this round will definitely go to the bad guys (overreaching DA's and police)
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.
Refusing to give up the encryption key would be contempt of court depending or your fifth amendment right depending on the price of your lawyer.
It was an iPhone X, so the police would hold it up to her face to unlock it. This has happened before.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
So? If you're served with a subpoena wiping the records instead is a crime, they don't have to prove the records would have been incriminating. I think it's obvious the same should apply to remotely wiping a seized device. You're free to set up any security policy you like in advance, even a dead man's switch if you want but taking active hostile action against a police investigation is not accepted in any legal system. Now I'm sure the US legal system has a lot of other issues, but I really fail to see how this makes them the bad guy. Not even a little.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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 . . . .
Parent is correct. I can confirm 5G does not penetrate my aluminum hat.
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.
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.
You don't have to provide an encryption key - you don't have to help them. But you cannot hinder them.
Similarly, lawyers and big corporations shred documents regularly, because that's legal. But once they are subpoenaed, it's illegal
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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.
Assuming you have a rooted Android phone you can probably accomplish that with Tasker.
She may "explain better", but I'm not going to watch a video to reply to a slashdot comment. Care to summarize? (Or is your point that you can be forced to help with biometric locks? Yeah, that's why you should have a PIN if you really care.) Also, offer only good in the USA..
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