Leaked Document Shows Government’s Ability To Infiltrate iPhones

A small smart phone - unlimited data in your tiny pocket! Seem to be a perfect combination, isn’t it? Certainly you will agree to this, as the burdening paper work has now been converted into a matter of a touch through your phones. You carry your years old mails, notifications and other personal data with you, wherever you go and all of this too just because of your phone.

But wait, aren’t you carrying a lot of personal information with yourself? What if it gets hacked or the Government tries to steal your data? Well it is happening now. New leaked document shows how large amounts ofinformation Government can steal from your iPhone!

A rare inventory that has recently been discovered brought something unexpected to the light; when a document submitted to court in connection with a drug investigation showed how federal agents are able to obtain all your data through your phone.

In this particular case, an iPhone was confiscated from a drug dealer’s room by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The federal agents used special software to extract almost everything out of the iPhone. It is dangerously-fascinating at the amount of information that was pulled out of the iPhone by the agents.

Here are is the list of items that was retrieved from the iPhone:

• Call activity

• Phone book directory information

• Stored voicemails and text messages

• Photos and videos

• Apps

• Eight different passwords.

• 659 geo-location points, including 227 cell towers and 403 WiFi networks with which the cell phone had previously connected.

So this makes one thing clear that we carry a lot of information from which people, especially Government can track our activities and interests. Our Call history, voice mails, text messages and photographs, all become open to the Government. They can search our Google history, whether it was anything related to terrorism or sex. Not only this, but also the apps that you downloaded will reflect what you read,listen and may be even think. This is because your smart phone is connected to you in every moment of your life and when it gets into the hands of such agents then your life gets completely exposed.

However, it is not possible to not to keep your iPhone completely clean of your personal information. Then what to do for safe keeping? There is a legal way for this and that is the police must have a warrant for rummagingyour phone for your personal data. The police should not be free to search the contents of your phone without a warrant. Furthermore, work should also be done on Companies such as Cellebrite that produces such portable forensics machines. This type of equipment, that provides the Government with the option of the quick, easy phone searches, is widely available to law enforcement agencies.

When the law is not really strong in such cases then the smart phone companies should themselves have good security measures to resolve this issue. This might include a PIN code or password that secures your personal life that you carry in your smart phone.

We had an idea on what kind of softwares the Government was using to hack into iPhones but non of us expected something like this. Well, what do you think about this? What new laws should be implemented?

(Via ACLU)