Police can now get information from water-logged phones

Manchester, U.K.-based mobile forensics company CY4OR is offering police silica-lined bags, into which they can drop waterlogged phones in the hope of extracting the water, and therefore some useful data too.

Bill Ray writes that the bags have been knocking around for a year or so, under the Bheestie brand, and sold to those who think they might drop their phone in the water while surfing, skiing, or doing other eXtreme sports. Most people never thinks this is going to happen, and by they time they find out how wrong they were it is too late.

CY4OR, which spends its time analyzing phones for the law enforcement community, reckons drying out is just what handsets need.

Mobile phones are a vital part of police investigations these days — the second thing a cop checks a body for, after checking for a wallet. The phone will tell the police where it has been, who it has spoken to, and in many cases what was said, too. Once you start to explore the cache created by social networking and mapping apps you can plot out much of an individual’s life, assuming you can lift the data out of the handset.

Ray notes that equally important, the handset will give up all that information without having to muck about with the Single Point of Contact, who will need appropriate authorization to make contact with the network operator and find out what it knows about the phone’s history.

It was never true that a criminal could drop his phone in a glass of water, making it impossible to read, but it does make it more expensive to retrieve that data. So the $20 baggy could save a lot of money, or, more likely, enable easy retrieval of data that would otherwise be discounted as too expensive to bother with.