
Police Can Get Access to Your Cellphone Data Even After the Supreme Court Ruling - sinak
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/police-can-get-access-to-your-cellphone-data-even-after-the-supreme-court-ruling
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alexandros
It's important to keep in mind that the phone holds more than location, call
logs, and text messages though. It holds our photos, email, apps, the apps'
storage, browsing history, and everything we do on the mobile internet.
Putting that off limits is definitely a victory.

~~~
pling
Or you could just stop using the tools that incriminate you? Voting with your
feet works pretty well.

~~~
nodata
> pling: Or you could just stop using the tools that incriminate you? Voting
> with your feet works pretty well.

What a stupid thing to say.

Are you seriously suggesting that people "just" opt-out of modern life?

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Spooky23
If I were a drug dealer, I would take the advice of fictional 1960s mobsters
in Goodfellas, and not use the phone.

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jeremysmyth
and more recently Marlowe's crew in The Wire.

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diafygi
The two ways mentioned in the article for how they can still do it are:

1) Ask the telco nicely.

2) MITM with things like stingray.

#1 can be solved by telcos starting to say no, which might be easier to do now
that you can blame it on economic fallout (e.g. Verizon losing the Germany
contract). #2 will likely be solved by a successful court challenge by the
ACLU.

Not hopeless, in my opinion.

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danielweber
How do either of those get the data stored _on_ the phone?

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diafygi
Presumably, they would sniff traffic coming from your phone, which is what the
article is talking about.

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afarrell
The police can get access to your cell phone data from the phone directly too.
Its just that when they try to present the data as evidence in criminal court,
you can prevent that by filing a motion to suppress that evidence. The police
won't be punished for the search unless you sue them in civil court.

The same thing is true of the NSA, but the NSA never presses criminal charges,
so it is only vacuously true.

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talmand
It's not just about cell phone usage, but what data exists on your phone that
doesn't leave the phone.

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walshemj
Badly worded title tracking location and meta data is not the same as
searching your phone for incriminating evidence.

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danielweber
The title feels link-baity. The headline could say "what the police can get
and how they can get it" but that wouldn't have been as clickable.

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graycat
A question?

How does the 'tracking' of the movements and location of a cellphone by the
cellphone towers and/or WiFi networks work?

Or, The tracking by the towers works all the time so that the cellphone
network will know how to send an incoming call to the phone? If so, is there a
way to turn _off_ the phone so that it can't receive calls and can't be
tracked, noticed, or followed by the towers?

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superuser2
1) Yes, your phone regularly communicates with the nearest cell towers and the
phone company can't help but know which one. However, this is imprecise -
resolution of a few blocks.

2) Most smartphones have GPS-based location services that use, well GPS, plus
the combination of WiFi networks and their signal strengths. To get reasonable
speed, this data needs to be cached locally, but only the data for where
you've actually been can fit. This is the reason for the huge fallout a couple
years ago about "Your iPhone is tracking your movements!" This cache can be
read with physical access (and the device's PIN).

3) Yes, turning off the phone will do that. Unless you are a specific target,
in which case law enforcement may have issued a software update just for you
that makes the phone only appear to shut down. The only way to be sure is to
take out the battery or not takke te phone with you.

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keithpeter
Under your heading 3) I'm just wondering how long it is before someone makes a
copper coated metal tin just the right size for each make of smart phone. Just
open the lid when you want to make a call or 'sync' with your network of
friends.

Could be fun if it went viral. Could even have pictures of your favourite
politician on the lid, Theresa May for the UK model I imagine.

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superuser2
>Just open the lid when you want to make a call

If it became normal to put your phone in a Faraday cage while not making a
call, no one would answer calls, and there would be no point in making them
:).

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keithpeter
An added benefit :-)

Seriously: observation on my daily commute suggests that actually making phone
calls is a minority use of the mobiles that people spend all the journey
stroking and looking at.

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superuser2
Public transit is an inappropriate place to make a voice call. People still do
it at home all the time.

