Met Police extract phones while suspects in custody

If this is an adapted policy in the Met, what happens when a person arrested comes in and his handset isnt covered by the ACESO? Does this then go to the forensic lab?, In my opinion ACESO does not have the greatest coverage of handsets so there could be 20-30% of handsets going to the lab, disjointing the whole operation.
What happens with phones that are covered but have password protection and arrestee refuses to hand over the code?
The training that is going to be given? training to show how the ACESO works or training into mobile telephone examination.
Also, arrestee comes in, he is interviewed and it is deemed no charges will be put, in normal circs this man can watch whilst his fingerprint records are destroyed etc, can he watch while his phone record is destroyed? how can he be certain it has? phones contain a multitude of items some are personal and private and if one is arrested and refuse charged or deemed completely innocent how on earth do the Met think they will get away with retaining such material
If this is not managed it could cost £££

Will it affect your job alex101?

Evidence is one thing, Understanding is another - http//trewmte.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/evidence-is-one-thing-understanding-is.html

This was done to reduce the backlog of work in our unit. Effectively we now have 30 more people examining phones (basic logical only). This means that our unit of 4 staff gets vastly reduced submission numbers. We now only get work that cannot be done via a basic plug & dump. It also means a faster turnaround on the lower priory cases that were constantly leap frogged and reduced bail backs where a decision can be made to charge whilst the suspect is sill in custody. We have been doing this for over a year and have seen a massive reduction in turnaround times.

Articles like that making the national news are simply going to make more criminals delete the incriminating information from their phone.

Articles like that making the national news are simply going to make more criminals delete the incriminating information from their phone.

Yes, it would, but welcome the challenge, it's not a bad thing!

If this system takes off, the more data which is deleted the more work will be submitted to each forces HTCU and subsequently farmed out to suitably equipped contractors, thus keeping the rest of us in business!

P

I think that while this may seem like a good idea, what about the legal side of things. How long will this info be kept? What about an individuals private information and that of others on my phone. What if one is eventually not charged what happens to this info. I really do not like the idea. If however one is charged by all means take all electronic devices.

Great to see such a lively debate!

LE agencies are under a lot of pressure to deal with phones, computers etc and senior managers in these agencies are under even greater pressure to keep cost's down and KPI's up.

The problem we face is the age old issue whereby the advice from the technical experts is not compatable or too complex for the 'leaders' to facilitate effectively.

The result is a risk assessed strategy that often can be equated to 'quick, cheap but not good' practices being implemented by those that do not appreciate that a 'good but slow or expensive' implementation may well be better in the long term.

Police officers do a great job but asking them to do digital forensics is simply appealing to their ego's & in my opinion and could be a disaster!

My opinion only! -)

LE agencies are under……KPI's.

It is the KPIs that need scrutiny, for that is where the devil is in the detail. KPIs are commonly mistaken for showing success rates, whereas in technical parlours, for instance, they are more accurately applied and used to assess where 'failure' and 'decay' first become noticed and trace backwards to the cause, which means the 'damage', 'degraded services' or 'loss of evidence' has already been incurred and continuing to occur for a period of time until a solution to the cause is found and implemented.

I have been in a position over the past year or so to be involved in a pilot of this Aesco Kiosk in my force. Although I am not trained to use the device or an officially trained forensic examiner in any other software I have had the oppertunity through my job to view a number of reports generated by Aceso for a number of different devices.

From my understanding we are not allowed to use Aceso for evidence should it be required for a prosecution. If after an initial examination of the device data/information is found which we would look to use during a case then further examination would be requested by our HTCU which would usually be in the form of an XRY report.

I have found Aceso to be both useful and also a hiderance at times. It's my view that law enforcement are in urgent need of a solution to provide forensically sound reports within strict timescales whilst suspects are in custody, which I am assuming is one of the reasons why Aceso was bought by our force.

During a recent investigation I had the oppertunity to see a number of reports created by diffferent software for the same device. This software was Aceso, XRY and also Oxygen. The results were somewhat concerning…

Initially the device was examained by Aceso which recovred some data from the phone which was pretty standard including SMS, contacts and call registers etc.

Later when I received a full report for the device created with XRY I was somewhat concerned that the number of SMS messages recovered was huge compared to the report by Aceso. There was other areas where the XRY examination provided a lot more information than Aceso.

Later when another report was requested for this device I viewed a report created with Oxygen. This had more or less a identical content to the XRY examination and it showed items that were not discovered by Aceso.

However on the other hand I have also viewed reports from Aceso which are identical to reports that have been
created with XRY, which has provided valuable evidence, quickly at an early stage in an investigation.

My 'personal' opinion of this device is that the principle is excellent however the actual implimentation of it gives me some concerns. From my experience it appears inconsistent and unfortunately at this time does not support enough devices as it is not unusual to have devices that are unsupported. I send all my devices for further examination regardless of the results of the Aceso examination wiith my justification being that is it no reliable enough.

As for the retention of data…..I do not believe that it should be treated any differently than any other data seized as part of a crriminl investigation and dealt with appropiately under the MOPI and CPIA guidelines if used in a prosecution. If a piece of paper was lawfully seized with twenty phone numbers on it, these could be used by police for intelligence purposes and submitted into an intelligence sysytem. I do not see how this is any different just becasue it is the content off a phone.

I have been in a position over the past year or so to be involved in a pilot of this Aesco Kiosk in my force. Although I am not trained to use the device or an officially trained forensic examiner in any other software I have had the oppertunity through my job to view a number of reports generated by Aceso for a number of different devices.

From my understanding we are not allowed to use Aceso for evidence should it be required for a prosecution. If after an initial examination of the device data/information is found which we would look to use during a case then further examination would be requested by our HTCU which would usually be in the form of an XRY report.

I have found Aceso to be both useful and also a hiderance at times. It's my view that law enforcement are in urgent need of a solution to provide forensically sound reports within strict timescales whilst suspects are in custody, which I am assuming is one of the reasons why Aceso was bought by our force.

During a recent investigation I had the oppertunity to see a number of reports created by diffferent software for the same device. This software was Aceso, XRY and also Oxygen. The results were somewhat concerning…

Initially the device was examained by Aceso which recovred some data from the phone which was pretty standard including SMS, contacts and call registers etc.

Later when I received a full report for the device created with XRY I was somewhat concerned that the number of SMS messages recovered was huge compared to the report by Aceso. There was other areas where the XRY examination provided a lot more information than Aceso.

Later when another report was requested for this device I viewed a report created with Oxygen. This had more or less a identical content to the XRY examination and it showed items that were not discovered by Aceso.

However on the other hand I have also viewed reports from Aceso which are identical to reports that have been
created with XRY, which has provided valuable evidence, quickly at an early stage in an investigation.

My 'personal' opinion of this device is that the principle is excellent however the actual implimentation of it gives me some concerns. From my experience it appears inconsistent and unfortunately at this time does not support enough devices as it is not unusual to have devices that are unsupported. I send all my devices for further examination regardless of the results of the Aceso examination wiith my justification being that is it no reliable enough.

As for the retention of data…..I do not believe that it should be treated any differently than any other data seized as part of a crriminl investigation and dealt with appropiately under the MOPI and CPIA guidelines if used in a prosecution. If a piece of paper was lawfully seized with twenty phone numbers on it, these could be used by police for intelligence purposes and submitted into an intelligence sysytem. I do not see how this is any different just becasue it is the content off a phone.

Regarding 20 phone numbers for intelligence purposes, fine, however the contents of a phone runs to more than just 20 phone numbers, what if there are corres from solicitor,Doctor, reverend? photographs of your children, details of ones medication and when to take it in the calendar entries etc etc,
I do agree regarding the handsets covered though securit, quite poor

I suppose you could look at it from another angle……

If documentation as mentioned, pictures, correspondance etc is seized from an address in paper format then it would be dealt with under MOPI and Data Protection Laws. I don't see how any information from a phone report is any different? It is just the same data in a different format.

Legally privilaged information would be dealt with differently and would have different guidelines applied to it as soon as it was identified on a device, in just the same way as it would if found in a filing cabinet in an office.