The FBI’s New Tactic: Catching Suspects with Push Alerts
fliptop writes:
The ubiquitous phone feature has powered a surveillance technique used to catch suspected kidnappers and pedophiles. It's also fueled fears of a 'privacy nightmare' at a time when abortion is criminalized:
The alleged pedophile "LuvEmYoung" had worked to stay anonymous in the chatrooms where he bragged about sexually abusing children. A criminal affidavit said he covered his tracks by using TeleGuard, an encrypted Swiss messaging app, to share a video of himself last month with a sleeping 4-year-old boy.
But the FBI had a new strategy. A foreign law enforcement officer got TeleGuard to hand over a small string of code the company had used to send push alerts - the pop-up notifications that announce instant messages and news updates - to the suspect's phone.
An FBI agent then got Google to quickly hand over a list of email addresses this month linked to that code, known as a "push token," and traced one account to a man in Toledo, an affidavit shows. The man, Michael Aspinwall, was charged with sexual exploitation of minors and distribution of child pornography and arrested within a week of the Google request.
The breakthrough relied on a little-known quirk of push alerts, a basic staple of modern phones: Those tokens can be used to identify users and are stored on servers run by Apple and Google, which can hand them over at law enforcement's request.
[...] The data has become prized evidence for federal investigators, who have used push tokens in at least four cases across the country to arrest suspects in cases related to child sexual abuse material and a kidnapping that led to murder, according to a Washington Post review of court records. And law enforcement officials have defended the technique by saying they use court-authorized legal processes that give officers a vital tool they need to hunt down criminals.
Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.