Mass Extraction: The Widespread Power of U.S. Law Enforcement to Search Mobile Phones

Every day, law enforcement agencies across the country search thousands of cellphones, typically incident to arrest. To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a “window into the soul.”

This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based on 110 public records requests to state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, our research documents more than 2,000 agencies that have purchased these tools, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such records have been widely disclosed.

Every American is at risk of having their phone forensically searched by law enforcement.

https://www.upturn.org/reports/2020/mass-extraction/

💡 Read as well:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/fbi-should-stop-attacking-encryption-and-tell-congress-about-all-encrypted-phones

#usa #fbi #lawenforcement #massextraction #MDFT #mobilephones #cellphones #encryption #decryption #study #thinkabout
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ProtonMail: User data for the USA thanks to good cooperation with authorities

ProtonMail, which claims to be a "secure e-mail service from Switzerland," supplies user data to security authorities. User data also goes to law enforcement agencies in the USA, as a current case shows.

The proceedings concern threats against, among others, the well-known immunologist Anthony Fauci. In a series of emails, the sender threatened, among other things, to kill Fauci and his family.

As the U.S. Department of Justice writes, the defendant used "an email account from a provider of secure, encrypted email services based in Switzerland."

According to the corresponding affidavit, this email service was ProtonMail. The relevant emails end accordingly with "Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email".

On the basis of data from ProtonMail, which was sent to the USA by way of legal assistance, it emerged that the defendant had used several user accounts at ProtonMail.

According to his own statements, the accused had switched to ProtonMail because he believed he was protected by Swiss data protection law and end-to-end encryption. Nevertheless, the sender could be identified in the interaction of data from ProtonMail as well as other online services.

https://steigerlegal.ch/2021/08/02/protonmail-daten-usa/

https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/press-release/file/1416926/download

#protonmail #usa #doj #userdata #pdf
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