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In the usecase I'm particularly familiar with (law enforcement, specifically of violent crimes), it's pretty valuable to minimize the amount of manual data hand

In the usecase I'm particularly familiar with (law enforcement, specifically of violent crimes), it's pretty valuable to minimize the amount of manual data handling investigators have to do. The State's Attorneys office/US Attorneys office/Prosecutor's office have finite resources and have to be selective about the cases they decide to spend resources on. Even if the correct suspect(s) has(have) been identified and arrested, the case can be rejected if the decision-making prosecutor thinks the evidence isn't strong enough or defending the evidence will be too difficult because evidence collection was done in a nonideal way. It may be possible to forward Signal messages to another device, but A) that just adds more links in the chain that can be challenged, and B) most detectives don't know that's an option or have any idea how to do it, so you'll regularly see sloppy stuff like photos taken by the detective of a phone displaying the messages of interest. It's just a lot easier for the investigator to just plug the phone into a Cellebrite UFED analyzer and extract as much as is covered either by their search warrant or by the signed consent form of the phone's user(s), and it's a lot easier to defend in court, as it eliminates room for accusations that investigators cherry-picked messages and data that look incriminating out of context. TL,DR: Even if it's not an impressive feature technologically, it's still a valuable feature to some of Cellebrite's main customers.

bigiain 6y ago
Having some familiarity, how often do you think " ... and extract as much as is covered either by their search warrant or by the signed consent form of the phone's user" is an accurate description of what actually happens in the field? Does a UFED even have a way of selectively extracting only what's covered by a warrant? Are warrants usually granted that would be considered outrageous fishing trips by the more privacy aware of us here?

bigiain 6y ago

Having some familiarity, how often do you think " ... and extract as much as is covered either by their search warrant or by the signed consent form of the phone's user" is an accurate description of what actually happens in the field? Does a UFED even have a way of selectively extracting only what's covered by a warrant? Are warrants usually granted that would be considered outrageous fishing trips by the more privacy aware of us here?