RFID, GPS Technology and Electronic Surveillance

Cops Love iPhone Data Trail

August 1, 2010

Chicago Sun Times - Detective Josh Fazio of the Will County Sheriff's Department loves it when an iPhone turns up as evidence in a criminal case.

The sophisticated cell phone and mobile computer is becoming as popular with police as it is with consumers because it can provide investigators with so much information that can help in solving crimes.

"When someone tells me they have an iPhone in a case, I say, 'Yeah!' I can do tons with an iPhone," said Fazio, who works in the sheriff's department high-tech crimes unit.

The iPhones generally store more data than other high-end phones -- and investigators such as Fazio frequently can tap in to that information for evidence.

And while some phone users routinely delete information from their devices, that step is seldom as final as it seems.

"When you hit the delete button, it's never really deleted," Fazio said.

The devices can help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide.

Former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics (O'Reilly Media) for law enforcement, said the devices "are people's companions today. They organize people's lives."

And if you're doing something criminal, something about it is probably going to go through that phone:

• Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.


• iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.


• Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said some of it could be useful to police.Clearing out user histories isn't enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners.
  

Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another.


"Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory or exculpatory," Minor said.

• The keyboard cache logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect so that it can correct a user's typing mistakes. Apple doesn't store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or text it was part of has long since been deleted.

Sometimes, the phones can help even if the case isn't a matter of life or death.

In Kane County, the sheriff's department used GPS information from one of the phones to help reunite a worried father with his runaway daughter, who was staying at a friend's house.

"His daughter felt comfortable at the house because she did not think her parents knew where she was, and she actually answered the door. She was a bit surprised as to the fact that [her] dad found her," said Lt. Pat Gengler, a spokesman for the sheriff's department.

Your Mobile Phone Becomes a Robot with Cellbots

July 12, 2010

Singularity Hub - Sure, we’ve all seen robots being controlled by a mobile phone, but how about a robot that is your mobile phone. Cellbots, an open source project based in Silicon Valley, has developed simple robots that incorporate smart phones into their frames. The phone is used to command and even power its robotic exoskeleton. Cellbots has created tanks, trucks, and various other wheeled bots, and provides all the information you need to replicate their results on your own, including the requisite software code for the phone. You can build your own robot shell for less than $50! Check out some of their many phone-robot hybrids in the videos below. They’ve experimented with everything from voice commands to compass navigation – this is pretty cool stuff.

Mobile phones have become the nexus for an impressive collection of electronic capabilities. Bluetooth signals, WiFi signals, GPS tracking, text messages – your smart phone can communicate in a half dozen ways (sometimes more) and has plenty of processing power. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Cellbots looked at the modern smart phone and saw a potential robot brain. In hindsight it seems a natural progression that as we place more and more computing power into a phone, it will become capable of controlling more and more outside of itself. Eventually, mobile devices may become powerful enough to serve as a communications nexus for the smart systems (such as cybernetic medical implants) that we’ll have on our own bodies, as well as serving as the portal to our digitally enabled homes, vehicles, and clothes.

In the following videos from Cellbots, you’ll see how the open source team is able to harness different smart phone capabilities including voice recognition, text-to-speech, compass orientation, remote commands, audio recoding, GPS, and XMPP chat:

Looking at the Cellbots themselves, it’s hard to know exactly where this project may be evolving. We’ve gotten so used to seeing phones as control units that watching them be incorporated into robots themselves is a little jarring. Do you really want to put a $400 smart phone on a collection of cardboard, servos, and Arduino boards? I mean, it looks really cool, but it’s not the safest location to leave your Android or iPhone. What’s the practical application here?

In the short term there may not be one. And I’m not sure there has to be one anyway. I’m taking Cellbots as an interesting proof-of-concept. We’ve seen many open source projects that can help you build a robot. Willow Garage, for example, is using an open source robot and library to revolutionize robotics research. Their PR2 robot can also be controlled via a smart phone through its web browser interface. Yet you can’t slap together a Willow Garage PR2 in a day the way you can a Cellbot. By using a well-explored technology like smart phones as a control and command hub for robots, Cellbots could be taking us a step closer to a sort of plug-n-play approach to making your own bot.

We already have tons of high quality robot building kits. Maybe one day hacking together a sophisticated robot will be as easy as plugging a smart phone into an assembled kit and downloading the right open source code. Heck, why stop at kits, we’ll have motorized wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs. The hacked humanoid robot of the future may practically be off-the-shelf. For now, I’m waiting to see if Cellbots will start to explore arms and grasping mechanisms. Having a phone wheel around is cool, but I’d love one that could bring me a drink.