California Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited police in that state from conducting warrantless searches of the cell phones of people under arrest.
“This measure would overturn a California Supreme Court decision that held that police officers can lawfully search the cell phones of people who they arrest,” the governor’s brief statement said. “The courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizures protections.”
The veto dismayed privacy advocates and others who said it could allow overzealous authorities to trample citizens’ constitutional rights.
California Sen. Mark Leno, who sponsored the bill (SB 914), responded: “This veto is very unfortunate. The message from the governor was rather incoherent. When you consider all the information that is accessible on one smartphone, if that same information was contained anywhere else police would need a warrant to search for it. So it makes no sense to carve out a legal exception for smartphone searches.”
According to California Assembly rules, state legislators must wait a year before attempting to reintroduce this legislation.
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It’s a Hollywood plot device as old as the Princess phone: The good guys receive a call from the kidnapper/mad bomber/drug lord, they need to string him along for 60 seconds to trace the call, but he’s wise to their time constraint and hangs up just short of the one-minute mark.
While it may have made Jack Bauer sweat bullets on “24,” the old 60-second rule is strictly firing blanks today.
“In the digital age, it’s immediate,” says private investigator Gary Tuttle of Assured Investigations in Atlanta. “As soon as the call is placed, it can be tracked and traced to where it is being originated.”
An FBI agent who spoke on condition of anonymity agrees: “If someone is calling from a landline, the carrier will know immediately. They can’t hide it from the phone company. It may come up on your phone as unavailable, but the phone company knows exactly where it’s coming from,” she says.
Back in the bell-bottomed pre-digital 1970s, telephone switchboards required operators to manually connect circuits, leaving the cops to cool their heels for 10 to 20 minutes while Ma Bell pinpointed the caller’s location. That first 60 seconds might only get operators to the first or second switching station, hence the old “Keep him talking, Chief!” gambit.
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Multiple reports from security companies all point in the same direction: the cloud and mobile devices, despite the undeniable opportunities they bring, pose the greatest threats for businesses, as far as technology is concerned.
According to security company AVG, identity theft is still on the rise and mobile devices are another way cybercriminals have found to target users. Cloud computing is also a threat as, according to AVG, “many organisations are relying more on web-based technologies, but aren’t investing in stronger IT defences”.
“If general carelessness continues to reign unabated, we are in for another bumpy ride,” says Lloyd Borrett, a security analyst for AVG AU/NZ.
The company’s 2011 edition of the top-five security threats list, includes mobile devices at the top, closely followed by small businesses.
“While a growing number of cybercriminals are specifically targeting small businesses, 85 percent of small businesses refuse to see the danger at all,” according to an AVG report. The report further states that small business owners often do not have proper security policies in place, as they feel they are “less of a cybercrime target than large companies”.
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The news coming from the Hackensack school district earlier this month was unsettling: Circulating among students’ smart phones were nude and sexually oriented pictures of a sixth-grader — yes, that’s right: a child of about 11 or 12 years old.
This was just the latest, but perhaps the most disturbing, of the seemingly continual stories about sexting, revenge photos, pictures taken covertly, and other incidents of great concern that are emerging as school districts deal with the proliferation of powerful tools of technology among their students.
A recent survey revealed that 75 percent of middle- and high-school students own “smart phones.” As any adult who counts an iPhone or a Blackberry as a beloved possession could attest, these phones are more than just tools of communication — they are a huge part of the students’ lives. Like adults, kids use them to organize their calendars, responsibilities and contacts. However, most adults are allowed to freely consult their phones at work, in full view, using them to guide their day, but most schools require students to keep theirs under wraps.
In fact, it seems that only occupants of two places — airplanes and schools — are prohibited from using their smart phones. Since the accepted rationale behind the ban on cell-phone use while a plane is in flight is that cell phones could potentially interfere with the aircraft’s instruments, and since my primary objective while flying is for the plane to return safely to the ground, I have never had much of a problem with that policy.
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A 7th Circuit judge sentenced Richard Red Fox of Rapid City to 25 years in prison Monday following his conviction in a child pornography case.
In December, a jury found Red Fox guilty of the possession, manufacture and distribution of child pornography, sexual exploitation of a minor, solicitation of a minor and misdemeanor dissemination of material harmful to a minor.
Red Fox, 27, was a convicted sex offender when he used his cell phone to “groom” another victim by sending her graphic sexual messages and photos, according to prosecutors.
“There’s a history here and it’s a concern,” Judge Mary Thorstenson said.
Thorstenson’s sentence prevents someone else from falling victim to Red Fox’s manipulation, according to Pennington County State’s Attorney Glenn Brenner.
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Bob Lotter is no longer surprised when his cell-phone technology, My Mobile Watchdog, leads to the arrest and conviction of predatory sex offenders who don’t have a criminal record and whom most of us would never suspect: teachers, professors, a deputy sheriff, a company executive. It’s a frightening irony that while our children’s cell phones free them to engage their social network, they can also be exposed to potential predators. Bob Lotter is out to change all that.
My Mobile Watchdog is a cell phone surveillance service that parents can use to keep track of who is communicating with their children. Anytime an unauthorized person attempts to contact their child, MMWD immediately alerts the parent with a copy of the exact text message, photo or phone number. It’s a service Lotter provides free to law-enforcement and it has led to hundreds of arrests and, Lotter notes, a 100% conviction rate.
What’s interesting about MMWD is that it is not spyware. The service is installed on a child’s phone with their full knowledge and understanding. It’s an important distinction because the goal is enhanced parent-child communication, not secretive invasion of privacy. The kids who get caught exchanging illegal images are not bad kids, necessarily. They are tech-savvy, but don’t have the wisdom to know how to use it.
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My wife and I sat cross-legged on the floor of a local Barnes & Noble store recently, surrounded by several large piles of books. We were searching for interior design ideas for a new home that we are planning to buy.
As we lobbed the books back and forth, sharing kitchen layouts and hardwood floor textures, we snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with our iPhones. We wanted to share them later with our contractor.
After a couple of hours of this, we placed the books back on the shelf and went home, without buying a thing. But the digital images came home with us in our smartphones.
Later that evening, I felt a few pangs of guilt. I asked my wife: Did we do anything wrong? And, I wondered, had we broken any laws by photographing those pages?
It’s not as if we had destroyed anything: We didn’t rip out any pages. But if we had wheeled a copier machine into the store, you can be sure the management would have soon wheeled us and the machine out of there.
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When FBI agents wanted to reconstruct the movements of a rogue New York City cop who staged a $1 million perfume heist in Carlstadt last February, they turned to cellphone records to trace his steps.
Using a computer mapping program and “call detail” logs obtained from Sprint Nextel, agents plotted the locations of 42 cell sites in Bergen and Hudson counties and New York to track Kelvin L. Jones’ movements as the armed robbery plot unfolded. Jones was convicted last month.
Cellular tracking of criminals — including those like Jones who use prepaid mobile phones that can’t easily be traced because there is no subscriber contract — has become a cottage industry for the FBI.
The demand for cell site records has mushroomed as the ability to zero in on phones has become more and more precise, drawing criticism from civil libertarians and prompting some courts to take a new look at the legal ground rules for granting access to such data.
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High-tech cheats, beware: German communications equipment manufacturer Rohde & Schwarz said that Taiwanese government officials recently purchased three of its FSH4 spectrum analyzers to watch for the presence of cell phones. The goal was to monitor an exam hall filled with prospective government workers. Officials prohibit cell phones during exams, because answers could be relayed to test takers by voice or text.
The National Communications Commission, Taiwan’s broadcasting regulator, also requested that the spectrum analyzers — normally used to test cell phone signal strength — have specific software modifications. “They didn’t tell us what they were going to do. They just told us what to design, and later we found out what it was for,” Rohde & Schwarz senior company engineer Lai Cheng-heng told PC World.
The modified devices were used in conjunction with earpieces, so that roving exam monitors would be quietly alerted when they were in the presence of an active cell phone. Officials said they identified at least three individuals using smartphones during the exam, though couldn’t say whether they’d be formally accused of cheating.
While spectrum analyzers can watch for the presence of unapproved devices, that’s not all they can do. According to a blog post by Gartner Group analyst John Pescatore, on the networking front, WLAN intrusion prevention systems (WIPS) already used spectrum analysis “to detect rogue access points in the early years of Wi-Fi use, and more recently . . . to detect misconfigured access points that might provide openings for attacks.”
But he said spectrum analyzers could be used to discover much more than just misconfigured Wi-Fi networks operating in the 2.5 and 5 Ghz bands. The devices could also probe for known smartphone and mobile device vulnerabilities, especially as more and more devices — not just smartphones but also iPads and laptops — get equipped with high-speed 3G connections. Because of that, “cellular frequencies represent a growing wireless path for outbound data leakage and inbound attacks,” he said. Not just for exam questions.
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A lot of people think of computers when they think of identity theft, but not too many people think of cell phones. This is too bad because they probably should. One reason why is that nine individuals in White Plains, New York, were recently charged in a cell phone cloning scam, to the tune of $15 million.
All of these individuals worked for a cell phone provider and used customers’ confidential information to create fake or cloned accounts. They were then able to use the customers’ numbers to make thousands of toll phone calls, including a whole lot of international ones. While the phone company refunded the charges to all of the affected customers, this is a sign of a disturbing trend.
Since these individuals legitimately had access to customer information, they didn’t have to perform any kind of extensive research to get it or purchase it on the black market. Consequently, there is nothing that the customers could have done to prevent the identity theft. Instead, they were just lucky that the company discovered the fraud – too bad it was after it was seen to be quite extensive.
One thing that they could do, though, is sign up for an identity theft protection plan, and then they would be able to possibly detect the unauthorized charges. Some plans will let you know if something out of the ordinary is happening with any of your credit accounts. According to prosecutors, the calls began within days of the numbers being accessed. If they were caught right away, a lot of the lost funds could have been prevented.
Another interesting thing is that the criminals were not high ups in the company brass but simply workers in one of the company’s retail stores. This means that almost anyone can get access to your personal information. You don’t have to be an experienced hacker or someone with privileged account access. Only makes getting an identity theft protection plan in place seem more imperative; doesn’t it?
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Vodafone New Zealand is distancing itself from security problems in Australia, saying its New Zealand data is well protected.
Vodafone Australia said yesterday it was investigating an alleged security breach involving millions of its customers’ personal details.
Fairfax newspapers reported that Vodafone’s customer database is accessible to all its dealers over the internet and that any dealer can look up personal information as well as call and text history.
The company has denied the details are publicly available on the internet.
Vodafone New Zealand spokesperson Matt East said the New Zealand company was not aware of any security breaches involving Vodafone customers here.
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If you find your cellphone has strangely got deactivated for a 12-hour period, check out if you’ve been a victim of a netbanking fraud. Criminals are increasingly resorting to the twin strategies of hacking into bank accounts and intercepting SMS alerts from reaching their targetted victims.
Sourabh Jain, 31, a senior business analyst with Wipro Technologies in Hinjewadi, who was duped of Rs2 lakh through an Internet banking fraud, is unhappy with the lack of progress in the case by the Shivajinagar police and the cyber crime cell of the city police, three months after the incident.
The first information report (FIR) lodged by him on December 3 states that on the night of October 15, an unidentified person transferred Rs1 lakh from his ICICI Bank account into three accounts of ICICI Bank using his identity, password and transaction password. Again, in the early hours of October 16, the culprit again transferred another Rs1 lakh into the same three ICICI Bank accounts, one in Aundh and two in branches in Thane.
Sourabh told DNA that the crime happened swiftly in a day-night operation, although he had never shared his login and password details with anyone. He said the netbanking criminals appeared to be professionals as they had simultaneously managed to block his SIM card, as a result of which he could not get SMS alerts sent by his bank.
“I observed that between the evening of October 15 and morning of October 16 my SIM card was blocked. As a result, I could not get the SMS alerts sent by my bank,” he said.
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