New gadget extracts evidence from cell phones – The New Britain Herald News : New Britain, Conn., and surrounding areas (newbritainherald.com)
With the help of an upgraded piece of equipment, city police Detective Michael Grossi was able to discern in less than a minute Monday that his superior officer had 93 text messages and 512 e-mails listed on his Blackberry.
He could also individually read each one. If any had been deleted, Grossi could have accessed the contents.
“With these tools we can interpret the data and get it off the phone,” said Lt. James Wardwell, who turned over his BlackBerry for the demonstration. “Right now he’s connected and sucking the data off. It took him about a minute to retrieve the data and hand me back my phone.”
If any of the information had contained child pornography, the quick analysis time could prevent a child from being molested again. That’s what Heather Steele. president and CEO of the Innocent Justice Foundation, was hoping for when she arranged for the city police department to receive two $2,500 grants from the Michael Bolton Charities, Inc. and the J. Walton Bissell Foundation earlier this year.
The police “are the vanguard of people who understand what these crimes are,” Steele said. “With the Internet it has exploded, but a lot of chief and command officers didn’t understand and chose to put their resources in things like burglary or homicides.”
Steele’s California-based non-profit organization connects law enforcement agencies in need of tools and training to investigate crimes against children with charities who are willing to fill the funding gap.
She was on hand Monday along with Jacqueline Smaga from Michael Bolton Charities and Dan Anthony from the West-Hartford based J. Walton Bissell Foundation to accept recognition from the city for their contribution and tour the department’s Digital Forensics lab to view the investigative techniques that their money helped buy.
“Our unit is probably the best in the state,” Mayor Timothy Stewart told the visitors minutes before he awarded them with plaques for their participation. “We started several years ago, way before most other departments. They’ve solved some pretty interesting cases, not just for our department, but for others as well.”
The department used the money to purchase upgrades to two pieces of equipment used to analyze mobile digital devices including BlackBerries, iPhones and other cell phones. Detectives must either obtain consent from the owner or a search warrant before they can search the digital devices, police said.
Wardwell created the digital unit in the 1990s as computer technology was increasingly becoming a factor in crimes and criminal investigations.
Computer Generated Evidence | Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer
The case referred to is: State v. Rivas, 121 Ohio St.3d 469, 2009-Ohio-1354. Case No. 2007-1611. Decided March 31, 2009. Majority opinion written by Justice Terrence O’Donnell.
By Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer
On January 3, 2005, Detective Alonzo Wilson, a member of the Xenia Police Division’s Internet Child-Protection Unit, logged onto an Internet chat service posing as a 14-year-old female named Molly. A man named Jose Rivas – using the screen name JRivas123 – contacted “Molly” asking for her age, gender, and photograph.
The two carried on an online conversation, and eventually Wilson e-mailed Rivas a teenage photo of a Xenia police detective. Rivas e-mailed Molly an explicit photo which, he claimed, was of him. He then propositioned her and offered her $200 to engage in sexual activity with him. Rivas eventually arranged to meet Molly at a hotel. After police observed Rivas checking in, Wilson arrested him.
Prior to trial, Rivas filed a motion to preserve the state’s electronic evidence and he sought a mirror image of the hard drive of the state’s computer used by Wilson to communicate with him. The trial court ordered the state to allow Rivas to inspect the computer, but the prosecution refused to allow the defense to retrieve a mirror image of the hard drive, citing “security reasons.” The prosecution did provide a transcript of the conversations and a compact disc containing an electronic copy of the online communications.
Rivas then filed a motion to suppress the computer-generated evidence and to compel the state to provide a mirror image of the computer hard drive. But the trial court denied the motion, concluding that Criminal Rule 16 – one of the rules that govern the proceedings of a trial – did not require the state to produce an exact copy of its computer hard drive “in the absence of allegations and some evidence that what has been provided is not accurate.”
[continued] Judge James Kimblers Blog: Computer Evidence.
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