[Fatboyrunning]

Let's say you're charged.

They seize your phone and pull photographs, text messages, messenger logs, maps data, etc. The messages are inculpatory.

What do you want to say? That the extraction method is unreliable, that the Police have incorrect logs? Imply that the text messages have been extracted with errors, somehow?

That simply isn't the case. The data extracted is both reliable and probative. This is a copy and paste.

[CameronNemo]

The data extracted is both reliable and probative. This is a copy and paste.

Debatable.

https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/

[alluro2]

Ouch, that's pretty nasty.

Also, I couldn't help but be amused by cheekiness:

"By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters."

[heavyset_go]

Chain of custody matters and if there's an untrustworthy link in that chain it calls into question the validity of the evidence itself.

[Kostchei]

sure, but if the phone company says there was an sms, when you open the phone it looks like there is an sms, and cellebrite extracts one, which you then present in a nice power point to the court... then your accusation as to tapering with the evidence and where in the chain of custody it occurred had better be good, or all you are going to do is annoy the court (as someone with dozens , maybe hundred+, of cellebrite reports in various court records) This is what armchair lawyers tend to forget, especially coders tend to forget. The law is not code. The judge is not a complier. When the law does not represent reality (this guys sells drugs and uses his phone to do it being a common reality) , then it becomes news-worthy.

But normally people just look at the reality and go "oh yes, this tool extracts the stuff on a phone and turns it into a pdf/html, how convenient". 99.99% of the time, the time a drug dealer alleging he has no knowledge of the 100's of deals on his phone is about as realistic as your 5 year old nephew with cake smeared on his face denying he ate the last bit of cake... and is treated as such. Should the act of selling drugs be a crime?- completely different topic.

[ClumsyPilot]

We have inprisoned 600 people in britain because electronic errors of transactions contained mistakes.

You cannot assume a random company's tech works reliably without any proof, if someone's life is at stake. If yhry have cloud upload shenanighans they could be mixing up records of different people.

Evidence from a network probider is a completely different matter, but if SMS records are enough you would not need this crap.

[kstrauser]

I don’t believe that’s the case at all. Cellebrite uses shady techniques kept in a black box. I see no reason to believe that it’s reliable at all. They’ve giving zero reasons to.

[sweetjuly]

Try your hand with this next time you're arrested and have your phone dumped, I guess. Tons of police departments across the US use them and so many courts have accepted data extracted from devices.

[brenns10]

People have been let off for crimes they obviously committed because the rock-solid evidence against them was illegally gathered or handled. I assume that's the sort of argument that should be leveled here: your evidence is illegal, you can't include that.

And I believe that's what the argument against secrecy with these systems is. How can you know whether legal lines have been crossed if the system is shrouded in secrecy?