UK Police Get Around iPhone Security In A Crafty Way
As it’s been reported for a while now, Apple is a company that favors user privacy over being able to co-operate with law enforcement. That creates an interesting situation. How does law enforcement get their hands on the data that’s inside an iPhone that is locked? UK cops have a crafty way of doing this according to the BBC:
Gabriel Yew had been under investigation for the suspected manufacture of fake cards that gangs were using across Europe to buy luxury goods. Detectives suspected that he was using an iPhone exclusively to communicate to other members of the network but knew if they arrested him, he could refuse to unlock it and they would never see incriminating evidence.
They considered whether they could legally force a suspect’s finger or thumb on to the device’s fingerprint reader to unlock it, but found they had no such power.
However, they concluded they could stage their own lawful “street robbery” – using a similar snatch technique to a thief – and in June a team set out to do precisely that.
Undercover surveillance officers trailed Yew and waited for him to unlock his phone to make a call – thereby disabling the encryption.
One officer then rushed in to seize the phone from Yew’s hand – just as would happen in a criminal mugging. As his colleagues restrained the suspect, the officer continually “swiped” through the phone’s screens to prevent it from locking before they had downloaded its data.
“The challenges of pin code access and encryption on some phones make it harder to access evidence in a timely fashion than ever before,” said Det Ch Insp Andrew Gould who led the operation.
“Officers had to seize Yew’s phone from him in the street. This evidence was crucial to the prosecution.”
Well, that’s crafty for sure. And it’s likely legal to boot. But I can see one way for the bad guys to protect themselves from this. All they have to do is keep a finger on the sleep button if they have an iPhone 6 or 7. If they do that, it’s just one finger twitch then back into their pocket in a locked and secured state. I’m also sure that some high tech means to avoid this situation will appear as well (if they haven’t already). So this may just be the start of an “arms race” between the bad guys who want to protect what’s on their phones, and law enforcement who wants access to that data.
December 12, 2016 at 2:51 pm
[…] device may be able to keep the device unlocked…. I wonder if this one has anything to do with this story where UK cops were able to get access to a suspects phone by snatching it out of his hands whilst […]