[HN] Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech ‘hush hush’
[HN] Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech ‘hush hush’
For years, cops and other government authorities all over the world have been using phone hacking technology provided by Cellebrite to unlock phones and In a leaked video, a Cellebrite employee urges law enforcement customers to keep their use of its phone hacking technology secret.
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]
Oh boy, here we go again with the dystopian secret evidence thing. “You're guilty. We can't show you the evidence against you because it's a secret. Off to prison with you.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This request concerns legal experts who argue that powerful technology like the one Cellebrite builds and sells, and how it gets used by law enforcement agencies, ought to be public and scrutinized.
“We don’t really want any techniques to leak in court through disclosure practices, or you know, ultimately in testimony, when you are sitting in the stand, producing all this evidence and discussing how you got into the phone,” the employee, who we are not naming, says in the video.
“The results these super-secretive products spit out are used in court to try to prove whether someone is guilty of a crime,” Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, told TechCrunch.
“The accused (whether through their lawyers or through an expert) must have the ability to fully understand how Cellebrite devices work, examine them, and determine whether they functioned properly or contained flaws that might have affected the results.”
“And anyone testifying about those products under oath must not hide important information that could help exonerate a criminal defendant solely to protect the business interests of some company,” said Pfefferkorn.
“It’s super important to keep all these capabilities as protected as possible, because ultimately leakage can be harmful to the entire law enforcement community globally,” the Cellebrite employee says in the video.
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