Technology

Without knowing how they got into his phone, this is a non-story that is just a retelling of older stories. For all we know they just took his dead finger and put it on the reader. Or maybe he used the same 4-digit PIN for his debit card or lock box or something else that they were able to recover. Maybe some detective just just randomly entered the shooter's birthday, only to say "Hey sarge, you're never gonna believe this... first try!"

There's nothing useful that can be taken away from this story yet, until more details come out.

Our local sheriff is using some spy level shit in our county that he refuses to explain.

He keeps "happening" upon crimes just "on accident." yesterday it was "stopped to take a pee in public park and caught a baddie" and two days before that it was "just happen to follow and pull over a guy with lots of pounds of pot hidden in the car."

The US police are spying on Americans phones, internet, GPS, and everything with no judicial recourse because it is corporations spying and then "giving the info" to the police for money.

The US law enforcement has gone full STAZI but using capitalism as additional cover.

The US is dead.

It's always a contest between security tools and penetration tools. The problem comes when law enforcement can do this without fair protections of privacy, say if they can easily establish probable cause ( My detection dog is signalling you have illegal data on your phone ) or they are allowed to get a warrant post-hoc for an otherwise illegal search.

...Or they do the illegal search and then engage in parallel reconstruction e.g. make a fake story about following up on an informant.

Once the police just seize and crack your phone on a whim, then the state no longer respects your privacy and autonomy, which means you can no longer consent to be governed, rather are controlled by gunpoint (surveillance and use of force). This is one of the critical ingredients to autocratic rule, since it does a lot to neuter the capacity of discontent turning into revolt.

I’m pretty sure it used to be easier with phones that didn’t have full disk encryption.

Good chance it was just putting the dead dudes finger on the scanner lmao

The article does mention Cellebrite.

Easier is a very relative term. It’ll be really expensive to use a genuine zero-day to do it. Such exploits are few and far between.

stingrays, people.

they sell the exploits and are all hush hush about it.

This is the would be assassin's phone.

They gave that to the NSA or FBI Counter Intel guys who are hooked in with NSA.

Your phone is not going there.

However I would be on the lookout for that tech coming down the pipelines.

Do they say what phone it was?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Just two days after the attempted assassination at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI announced it “gained access” to the shooter’s phone.

Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal to extract data from phones.

The bureau famously butted heads with Apple in late 2015 after the company refused to help law enforcement get around the encryption on the San Bernardino, California shooter’s iPhone.

Early in the following year, Apple refused a federal court order to help the FBI access the shooter’s phone, which the company said would effectively require it to build a backdoor for the iPhone’s encryption software.

“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor,” Cook wrote.

Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the Pensacola shooting was one of the last times federal law enforcement agencies loudly denounced encryption.

The original article contains 1,208 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Can they access Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS? I think not

Never keep anything on your phone that would require you to lock it.

I've never locked my phone.

For GrapheneOS full disk encryption, am I correct in understanding that the disk is encrypted when my phone is locked and decrypted when I unlock it? So I don't need to turn it off for it to be encrypted, as long as it's locked it's encrypted?

A 2020 investigation by the Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization Upturn found that more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia had access to mobile device forensic tools (MDTFs).