Smartphone remote wiping feature thwarts secret service, law enforcement
Smartphones such as Blackberry and iPhone offer a remote-wipe feature: if your phone is lost or stolen, you can remotely erase all the data stored on the phone; this feature protects one’s privacy, but it also allow the accomplices of criminals and terrorists captured by law enforcement remotely to erase all incriminating and intelligence-relevant data from the suspect’s phone before the police can access it
Smartphones that offer the ability to “remote wipe” are great for when you lose your device and you want to delete your data so that someone else would not be able to look at it. This feature is not so great for the U.S. Secret Service (USSS).
Ben Grubb writes in ZDNet.com.au that 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 the other day on mobile phone forensics at the AusCERT 2010 security conference.
The problem is that accomplices can remotely wipe the phones if the agencies do not remember to remove the battery or turn off smartphones before sending them off to the forensics laboratory, he said. “So if you’ve got a suspect and you take the cell phone away from him, and he’s got somebody on the outside that can help get on the [remote wipe] Web site to get his phone wiped, all your evidence is gone before you get a chance to examine,” he said.
Kearns said he had never personally faced the situation, but he knew other examiners who had. “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. “Hopefully our officers are putting the cell phones in a Faraday bag that is shielded, pulling the battery [out] and turning them off [before] getting them into the shielded laboratory.”
