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Content type: Long Read
As more and more of us feel compelled to cover our faces with masks, companies that work on facial recognition are confronted with a new challenge: how to make their products relevant in an era where masks have gone from being seen as the attribute of those trying to hide to the accessory of good Samaritans trying to protect others.
Facewatch is one of those companies. In May 2020, they announced they had developed a new form of facial recognition technology that allows for the…
Content type: Report
The majority of people today carry a mobile phone with them wherever they go, which they use to stay connected to the world. Yet an intrusive tool, known as an International Mobile Subscriber Identity catcher, or “IMSI catcher” is a form of surveillance equipment that enables governments and state authorities to conduct indiscriminate surveillance of mobile devices, and by extension, on users.
IMSI catchers can do much more than monitor and intercept mobile communications. Designed to imitate…
Content type: News & Analysis
Send a Freedom of Information Request to your local police for to see if they are using cloud extraction here.
On 12 December 2018 a member of Lancashire Police Department UK told viewers of a Cellebrite webinar that they were using Cellebrite's Cloud Analyser to obtain cloud based 'evidence'. In response to a Freedom of Information request Hampshire Constabulary told Privacy International they were using Cellebrite Cloud Analyser.
They are not alone. In Cellebrite's 2019 Annual Trend Survey…
Content type: News & Analysis
Cloud extraction allows law enforcement agencies to take huge amounts of your data from the Cloud via a legal back door. If law enforcement seize your phone or take it from a victim of crime, they can extract tokens or passwords from the device which lets them get access to data from apps such as Uber, Instagram, Slack, Gmail, Alexa and WhatsApp.
In so doing, law enforcement agencies can avoid official channels through cloud companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. There is no check on…
Content type: Long Read
Mobile phones remain the most frequently used and most important digital source for law enforcement investigations. Yet it is not just what is physically stored on the phone that law enforcement are after, but what can be accessed from it, primarily data stored in the Cloud.
Cellebrite, a prominent vendor of surveillance technology used to extract data from mobile phones, notes in its Annual Trend Survey that in approximately half of all investigations, cloud data ‘appears’ and that ‘[t]…