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Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

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Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#121
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no amount of technical argumentation will save you from a prosecutor, judge, or jury if you do something that causes spoiliation of evidence Powerful people seem to get away with this....

Such as?

Too big to spoil banks?

You don’t really need to look very far. The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free.

Or at least, just get off with a fine, it’s the company doing a wrong after all, and you can’t jail a company.

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#122
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a good question. I don't know how related it is, but I haven't seen anything about the legality or illegality of warrant canaries[1], so there might be something to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

Further down the wikipedia page there’s a link to moxie marlinspike saying warrant canaries don’t work because not updating them is legally the same as disclosing you’ve received a secret warrant. In other words, you have to lie in your canary or violate the warrant.

Has that been tested at the appellate level? The government can compel silence (gag orders,) but the government can’t compel speech, which is what updating a warrant canary is. This seems to be ready made for the Supreme Court.

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#123
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

I suspect they were alluding to Hillary's email server scandal.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...

> In 2014, months prior to public knowledge of the server's existence, Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and two attorneys worked to identify work-related emails on the server to be archived and preserved for the State Department. Upon completion of this task in December 2014, Mills instructed Clinton's computer services provider, Platte River Networks (PRN), to change the server's retention period to 60 days, allowing 31,830 older personal emails to be automatically deleted from the server, as Clinton had decided she no longer needed them. However, the PRN technician assigned for this task failed to carry it out at that time

I guess people of varying political viewpoints would differ on whether Clinton had gotten away with anything. But plenty of other cases in which powerful people did not get away with destroying evidence. Or rather, they had the ability to destroy email evidence and didn't, because they knew they wouldn't get away with it. Gen. David Petraeus [0], for example, and the officials currently under the Mueller probe.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-p...

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#124
post #121
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

Too big to spoil banks? You don’t really need to look very far. The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free. Or at least, just get off with a fine, it’s the company doing a wrong after all, and you can’t jail a company.

> The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free.

Having so many people involved is as much a liability as any kind of benefit. It means more people to testify, and if you are involved in a cover up, more people willing to join in your conspiracy. Bigger companies also likelier have better guidelines regarding automated processes, are you suggesting any deletion by an automated process should be judged as suspect?

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#125

Howdy, digital forensics software developer here. A few points: 1) yes, the police probably should have put the phone in a Faraday bag, but those aren’t perfect and municipal law enforcement generally doesn’t have the same equipment that state and federal police do. It doesn’t excuse the suspect allegedly taking action to destroy evidence; 2) this is probably about the boyfriend, who they suspect committed a shooting…

How do you get into digital forensics dev? Seems like an interesting field.

It really depends. I have a friend that used to work for Kroll Ontrack under their forensics unit. She quit after a few years due to the disturbing amount of child porn she had to recover. She knew she was doing good stuff in putting those predators in prison, but it really eats away at you. She's now working on an internal infosec team at Verizon, a job she really loves.

To answer your original question, she has a degree in computer forensics.

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#126

Howdy, digital forensics software developer here. A few points: 1) yes, the police probably should have put the phone in a Faraday bag, but those aren’t perfect and municipal law enforcement generally doesn’t have the same equipment that state and federal police do. It doesn’t excuse the suspect allegedly taking action to destroy evidence; 2) this is probably about the boyfriend, who they suspect committed a shooting…

Could they not simply have put it flight mode? I appreciate that may not be possible for all makes of phone, but this was an iPhone X.

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in America

Well, not if you're physically located in in the U.S. at the tome, but the GDPR effects non-EU businesses and governments as long as the person involved is an EU citizen.

No it doesn’t! The citizenship has nothing to do with the law. It’s the residency. An EU citizen living in New York has exactly zero to do with GDPR. An American citizen living in Paris though, would be covered by the law.

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#128
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's far from a mere technical detail, as it also means the person lacked any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence. That would still be irrelevant if their intention for getting themselves to "lack any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence" is deemed by a judge to be malicious.

You have badly misunderstood the point the GP was making. The person in question was always in a state of “lack[ing] any physical control of or, proximity to, the evidence”. They had no control of this in any way. This, by the way is why the technical issues are important, relying solely on the lay person interpretation is dubious. A court that issued ruling on issues it doesn’t understand is inherently unjust.

>The person in question was always in a state of “lack[ing] any physical control of or, proximity to, the evidence”. They had no control of this in any way.

Well, if they arranged so they are always, from the start, in that position, with the intent to leverage that "lack of control" to not produce evidence (i.e. with doing some law breaking in mind), that could still be considering incriminating...

And that, in the end, is a lay person's judgement to make...

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#129
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how warrant canaries work, though there is no case law I'm aware of that determines whether or not they are actually legal. The idea is that you have a message you update regularly to specify whether you have received an NSL -- you never delete the latest version. If you get an NSL you comply by doing nothing (and by your inactivity you've signalled that the warrant canary was tripped). There is a valid fr…

Schneier is right. Warrant canaries are just another side of the same coin as the sovereign citizen movement. Word games and magical thinking is not going to fool any judges. While I do think secret warrants are unjust most of the time (and nobody can verify that they are justly applied when applied), the intent of the law is obviously to not let anyone know about the warrant, if you do you have broken the law regard…

I think it's a bit strong to conclude that if a judge disagrees with you on this topic it is activism. This is relatively untested/uncharted legal territory and, at least in the US, it is complex. For places like Australia that have no guaranteed first amendment rights, I would agree that it is much more cut and dry because there are other laws already in place that can limit your speech through due process.

The same is true about due process in the US, but there are limitations on what it can apply to regarding speech. The US government can legally stop you from speaking on certain matters via court order. But speech is explicitly separated from lack of speech in the US and are treated as two totally separate things. There is legal standing that non-speech cannot be considered as speech - this goes hand in hand with the 5th amendment and how a person's refusal to speak and provide testimony against themselves cannot in of itself be considered evidence against them. So a lack of speech cannot be considered evidence of guilt.

Also, there is a substantial body of law protecting the people (even government employees) from being forced to say anything by government. So, for others here wondering if the US can require them to keep updating it - they almost certainly cannot. There may be a way around that because the US government does have a fairly broad ability to regulate businesses so they could, in theory, pass legislation requiring businesses update this...maybe. But I doubt such a law would pass challenges as it would be challenged on first amendment grounds and the idea that other compulsive speech requirements on businesses have generally been geared toward information sharing and notifications of legal rights and other things that protect consumers. This is something entirely different and doesn't fall in those categories. Those requirements are all structured around spreading truthful information to keep consumers informed where here the government would be requiring businesses to lie - something that could easily be argued is against consumer interest.

Re: Destruction of evidence charges filed for remotely wiping iPhone

#130

Howdy, digital forensics software developer here. A few points: 1) yes, the police probably should have put the phone in a Faraday bag, but those aren’t perfect and municipal law enforcement generally doesn’t have the same equipment that state and federal police do. It doesn’t excuse the suspect allegedly taking action to destroy evidence; 2) this is probably about the boyfriend, who they suspect committed a shooting…

How about the threat of a 3rd party _adding_ information to a device? That sounds like another threat if someone wants to frame a suspect (i.e. another reason why devices should be placed in Faraday bags)
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