Report: Postal inspectors using tech to break into cell phones
An expert in privacy and technology is raising a warning about the activity of the United States Postal Inspection Service, which has boasted in annual reports of hacking into hundreds of cell phones and other devices, extracting the data for law enforcement to review.
Jake Wiener, of fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a report in Just the News that the tech is dangerous and can be abused.
And there’s all that information in the phones.
“Cellphones contain multitudes of intimate information about all aspects of our lives, messages with family, private pictures, records of our movements, and much more,” he told Just the News. “Phone hacking tools are a direct threat to privacy because they can expose information that everyone wants to keep private, and would be irrelevant to a criminal investigation.”
Jennifer Granick, of the American Civil Liberty Union’s project on privacy and tech, identified the programs as those like Cellebrite and GrayKey.
They provide law enforcement “the ability to access and analyze far more information than ever before,” she said.
“This includes information people do not know is on their devices, such as deleted and temporarily stored data. Forensic tools can unlock and extract private information that is irrelevant to an investigation, and there are inadequate safeguards in place to make sure this information will not be misused.” – READ MORE
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