Michigan State Police have a device that can suck your cell phone in seconds

[thewayne]

and they use it at routine traffic stops. The ACLU is suing them for Fourth Amendment violation.

"A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

"Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps.""

Man, I hope the ACLU wins on this one. This is entirely too much power too easily used without having reasonable suspicion and a proper search warrant. I'm also curious how well this works against a fully-encrypted Android OS phone.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/04/19/2231240/Michigan-Police-Could-Search-Cell-Phones-During-Traffic-Stops

Comments

[silveradept]

Probably works just fine against a phone encrypted in that manner - but the bit about doing this without a warrant or even any sort of reasonable cause should make it easy for a judge to tell them to stop and to confiscate the toys.