New bill could allow police to track your real-time movements via your mobile phone

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Tues. April 27, 2021 | By Sarah Mastouri – ABC News – wlos.com |

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — A new bill is on the table that would allow police across the state to track your whereabouts in real-time using your cell phone.

Police have already been able to track your phone without a warrant.

But with this new bill, House Bill 213, it would streamline the process and give officers access to your location in an emergency situation.

The bill came to light following a 2007 case where a teen was abducted and murdered, which some say, this new legislation could have saved her life.

Jerome McCain of Winston-Salem who just moved to the area from Miami says he feels safe in his community.

“It’s quiet, peaceful and gated,” he said.

When ABC 45 told McCain about the bill, he said it’s simply the police doing their job.

“As long as that tool is used for what is, what it’s purpose is for, for emergencies only and no body basically uses that to their advantage for anything else, then I’m all for it,” he said…

Read more here

7th Circuit: 47-year sentence affirmed for Indiana man in armed robbery crime spree

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Tues. April 27, 2021 | By Katie Stancombe – The Indiana Lawyer |

A Hoosier man caught after leading a string of armed robberies in the Midwest could not convince the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that both his conviction and sentence should be overturned and vacated.

During a three-week crime spree in October 2017, Rex Hammond robbed and attempted to rob seven different stores at gunpoint in Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan. In Indiana, the robberies took place in Logansport, Peru, and Auburn, while the attempted Michigan robberies occurred in Portage and Kalamazoo.

The government charged Hammond with five counts of Hobbs Act robbery and several attendant weapons charges, which included one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) and two counts of brandishing a weapon during a crime of violence in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c).

A jury convicted Hammond on all charges and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana sentenced him to 47 years in prison, prompting Hammond to appeal his conviction and sentence.

Specifically, he cited Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018) and argued that the district court should have suppressed certain cell site location information (CSLI) that law enforcement used to locate him during his robbery spree and to confirm his location on the days of the robberies.

He also contended that the district court erred in instructing the jury regarding the felon-in-possession charge under Rehaif v. United States, 139 S. Ct. 2191 (2019). Finally, he claimed that Hobbs Act robbery is not a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) or under the Sentencing Guidelines, so his § 924(c) conviction must be overturned, and his sentence vacated.

In rejecting each of his arguments, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in a Monday decision affirmed Hammond’s conviction and sentence in USA v. Rex Hammond, 19-2357…

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Supreme Court Asked to Review DHS’s Warrantless Searches of International Travelers’ Phones, Laptops

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Mon. April 26, 2021 | By Homeland Security News Wire |

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Massachusetts on Friday filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s policy and practice of warrantless and suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at U.S. airports and other ports of entry.

The lawsuit, Merchant v. Mayorkas, was filed in September 2017 on behalf of several travelers whose cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices were searched without warrants at the U.S. border. In November 2019, a federal district court in Boston ruled that border agencies’ policies on electronic device searches violate the Fourth Amendment, and required border officers to have reasonable suspicion of digital contraband before they can search a traveler’s device. A three-judge panel at the First Circuit reversed this decision in February 2021.

“Border officers every day make an end-run around the Constitution by searching travelers’ electronic devices without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “The U.S. government has granted itself unfettered authority to rummage through our digital lives just because we travel internationally. This egregious violation of privacy happens with no justification under constitutional law and no demonstrable benefit. The Supreme Court must put a stop to it.”

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In epic hack, Signal developer turns the tables on forensics firm Cellebrite

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Wed. April 21, 2021 | By Dan Goodin | ARS Technica |

Widely used forensic software can be exploited to infect investigators’ computers.

For years, Israeli digital forensics firm Cellebrite has helped governments and police around the world break into confiscated mobile phones, mostly by exploiting vulnerabilities that went overlooked by device manufacturers. Now, Moxie Marlinspike—creator of the Signal messaging app—has turned the tables on Cellebrite.

On Wednesday, Marlinspike published a post that reported vulnerabilities in Cellebrite software that allowed him to execute malicious code on the Windows computer used to analyze devices. The researcher and software engineer exploited the vulnerabilities by loading specially formatted files that can be embedded into any app installed on the device.

Virtually no limits

“There are virtually no limits on the code that can be executed,” Marlinspike wrote.

He continued:

For example, by including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in an app on a device that is then scanned by Cellebrite, it’s possible to execute code that modifies not just the Cellebrite report being created in that scan, but also all previous and future generated Cellebrite reports from all previously scanned devices and all future scanned devices in any arbitrary way (inserting or removing text, email, photos, contacts, files, or any other data), with no detectable timestamp changes or checksum failures. This could even be done at random, and would seriously call the data integrity of Cellebrite’s reports into question.

Cellebrite provides two software packages: The UFED breaks through locks and encryption protections to collect deleted or hidden data, and a separate Physical Analyzer uncovers digital evidence (“trace events”).

To do their job, both pieces of Cellebrite software must parse all kinds of untrusted data stored on the device being analyzed. Typically, software that is this promiscuous undergoes all kinds of security hardening to detect and fix any memory-corruption or parsing vulnerabilities that might allow hackers to execute malicious code.

“Looking at both UFED and Physical Analyzer, though, we were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite’s own software security,” Marlinspike wrote. “Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present.”

Compromising integrity

One example of this lack of hardening was the inclusion of Windows DLL files for audio/video conversion software known as FFmpeg. The software was built in 2012 and hasn’t been updated since. Marlinspike said that in the intervening nine years, FFmpeg has received more than 100 security updates. None of those fixes are included in the FFmpeg software bundled into the Cellebrite products.

Marlinspike included a video that shows UFED as it parses a file he formatted to execute arbitrary code on the Windows device. The payload uses the MessageBox Windows API to display a benign message, but Marlinspike said that “it’s possible to execute any code, and a real exploit payload would likely seek to undetectably alter previous reports, compromise the integrity of future reports (perhaps at random!), or exfiltrate data from the Cellebrite machine.”

Marlinspike said he also found two MSI installer packages that are digitally signed by Apple and appear to have been extracted from the Windows installer for iTunes. Marlinspike questioned if the inclusion constitutes a violation of Apple copyrights. Apple didn’t immediately provide a comment when asked about this.

In an email, a Cellebrite representative wrote: “Cellebrite is committed to protecting the integrity of our customers’ data, and we continually audit and update our software in order to equip our customers with the best digital intelligence solutions available.” The representative didn’t say if company engineers were aware of the vulnerabilities Marlinspike detailed or if the company had permission to bundle Apple software.

Marlinspike said he obtained the Cellebrite gear in a “truly unbelievable coincidence” as he was walking and “saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me.” The incident does seem truly unbelievable. Marlinspike declined to provide additional details about precisely how he came into possession of the Cellebrite tools.

The fell-of-a-truck line wasn’t the only tongue-in-cheek statement in the post. Marlinspike also wrote:

In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some time already, and only probabilistically in low percentages based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.

The vulnerabilities could provide fodder for defense attorneys to challenge the integrity of forensic reports generated using the Cellebrite software. Cellebrite representatives didn’t respond to an email asking if they were aware of the vulnerabilities or had plans to fix them.

“We are of course willing to responsibly disclose the specific vulnerabilities we know about to Cellebrite if they do the same for all the vulnerabilities they use in their physical extraction and other services to their respective vendors, now and in the future,” Marlinspike wrote.

 

Read the original story HERE.

NC lawmakers want to give police even more power to track your phone without a warrant

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Wed. April 21, 2021 | By  Will Doran and Danielle Battaglia | The News & Observer |

For at least a decade now, police all around North Carolina have been tracking people’s cellphone locations without getting a warrant first.

The courts have let them do it, ruling in recent years that law enforcement can ask phone companies for someone’s historical location data even if they don’t have the probable cause needed for a warrant. And on Wednesday a committee at the General Assembly advanced a new bill that, if passed into law, would give police the ability to track someone’s real-time movements without a warrant — not just where they’ve been in the past, but where they are at any given moment.

Critics say they have concerns about people’s constitutional rights being violated, as well as what might happen if a criminal was able to take advantage of the looser rules to impersonate a police officer and stalk a victim.

“It’s a very invasive way of seeing where a person is going, what they’re doing, who they’re seeing,” said Ann Webb, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s state branch.

The bill is sponsored by Republican Rep. Pat Hurley of Asheboro and is a version of legislation called “The Kelsey Smith Act,” which has passed in several other states. It has also passed the North Carolina House of Representatives, but not the Senate, in years past. The bill, House Bill 213, is named after a Kansas teenager who was kidnapped and murdered in 2007…

Read more here