August 26, 2007
What Your Cell Phone Knows About You
A very interesting article from TIME on how a handful of forensic experts are developing new methods to access the inner secrets in cell phones.
"... A small group of international forensic code breakers is working to go beyond the obvious and familiar — the call logs and address books — and tap deeper into our phones, into a hidden gold mine of personal information. Their work is prompting kudos from crime busters while raising concern among civil libertarians.
Twenty years ago it would have taken a police agency months of shoe leather and paper hunting to assemble the kind of information that is available on a cell phone's internal memory and which can be extracted by a deep probe.
Says Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union technology and liberty program: "They contain a great amount of information that essentially is a subjective picture of our habits, our friends, our interests and activities, and now some even have location tracking."
... Europe's single, standardized GSM network, as opposed to the multi networks — GSM, CDMA and iDEN found in the U.S. — gave European forensics investigators an edge as they began to develop ways of accessing a phone's internal memory.
Two of the leading cell phone forensics experts are British — West Yorkshire Detective Constables Steve Hirst and Steve Miller. Like their American colleagues — "tinkerers" as Mislan calls them — the two spend their evenings buying up old cell phones on eBay, deconstructing and decoding them, and then sharing their research online with colleagues around the world."
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