Word: celling
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...Most cell phone owners think simply removing a phone's SIM card removes personal information, but the phone's internal memory, even communication exchanged between the phone and its server, remain. Phone manuals detail how to perform multiple reset commands to erase personal information and some online recycling phone services offer command sets for specific phones, but most people never bother to go through the tedious process, Mislan says. For example, child predators who stalk "moblogs" - the cell phone equivalent of web blogs that are popular with young phone users - may believe they have deleted text messages and postings...
...with simple if crude methods. Drug dealers, Mislan says, will buy throwaway phones, assign distinctive rings to customers or suppliers, and then destroy the screen, leading an arresting officer to believe the phone is broken or the phone's information is inaccessible. (Old-style forensics often means laboriously photographing cell phone screen after cell phone screen to record evidence...
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...