Word: celling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Typically, law enforcement agencies rely on simply "thumbing through" a cell phone to retrieve data, says Sgt. Michael Harrington, a detective with the Michigan State police. Another tool, as anyone who has watched the nightly cable crime news shows knows, is "pinging" a phone to search for its location, helpful in missing-persons cases and in tracking suspects. A more complex forensic approach now available utilizes a command system developed in the late 1970s to initialize modems to ask the phone specific questions about the information it may be storing. Those commands, known as AT, were one of the tools...
...cell phones respond to modem-style commands and some cell phone developers are often loath to share their proprietary technology. Nokia phones are particularly hard to crack, Harrington says. In the U.S. alone there are over 2,000 models of phones - and even within one model line there may be a dozen phones using different codes for each function. "We are in a constant state of catch-up - a company rolls out new models every three to six months," Mislan says. The Holy Grail for the cell phone code breakers is to develop a forensics tool - a "Swiss Army knife...
Europe's single, standardized GSM network, as opposed to the multi networks - GSM, CDMA and iDEN found in the U.S. - gave European forensics investigators an edge as they began to develop ways of accessing a phone's internal memory. Two of the leading cell phone forensics experts are British - West Yorkshire Detective Constables Steve Hirst and Steve Miller. Like their American colleagues - "tinkerers" as Mislan calls them - the two spend their evenings buying up old cell phones on eBay, deconstructing and decoding them, and then sharing their research online with colleagues around the world...
...Europe, Constable Miller says, so-called "flasher boxes" are used to hold a cell phone's memory while repairs are under way. The boxes are the size of a deck of cards and come with about 100 cables that can be connected to specific data points on different phones and offer direct access to memory. Flasher technology allows the investigator to do a "hex dump" of the cell phone's memory - a large amount of hexadecimal code - and then write software to decode the information. It is not the 30-second process seen on the popular CSI television shows...
Meanwhile, the demands on the code breakers exceed their ranks, despite a growing number of computer and cell phone forensics programs at U.S. universities. Recently, an Indiana state prison official handed Mislan a bag of smuggled phones confiscated from inmates who are suspected of using them to conduct criminal activities from behind bars, but Mislan says that because of other investigative work, it will be six to 12 months before he has the time to take a look at them...