Phoning For Forensics: What Your Mobile Phone Company Tells The Police
By Mike Masnick, Tue Aug 17 00:30:00 GMT 2004

It's not new, but these days, one of the first places the police call for evidence in criminal cases is the mobile phone company to find out where the suspect was at the time of the crime.


If you're planning on committing a crime, you might want to leave your phone at home -- or, maybe, give it to someone else for the day. While it's been used before, police increasingly know that one of the first place to go in checking up on criminal suspects is to their mobile phone records. While many are worried about giving up information in exchange for location-based services, the police are making use of phone records in quite detailed ways, whether or not subscribers have agreed to provide information. The operators are somewhat secretive about it, but appear to have teams who handle forensics requests from law enforcement agencies.

Even with more phones including some GPS capabilities, the standard forensics issue appears to focus on location by the nearest cell tower, which is usually accurate enough to pinpoint if someone was near a crime scene at the time of the crime.

Still, connecting the dots between where a mobile phone was and where its owner was is a bigger question. In fact, the article points out that some criminals are using this to their advantage. A criminal planning a bank robbery, for instance, may pay someone to head to some remote location, hundreds of miles away (that still has cell coverage) where he's told to make a variety of phone calls, giving the criminal an instant alibi, should he be accused of robbing the bank. This doesn't seem foolproof, of course. Whoever was on the receiving end of those calls would also need to be in on the scam, and willing to lie in court, claiming the phone calls came from the criminal in question. Within organized crime groups, however, this does not sound particularly far-fetched. Even worse, it's not hard to see this go one step further, using stolen mobile phones to frame individuals.

In fact, should a few high profile cases with this type of tactic appear, it could do additional harm to cases that rely on mobile phone forensics. This could be a good thing, however, in that it makes it more likely the police would need to use other methods of forensics as well to truly prove the case, rather than relying on where you mobile phone said you were. Mobile phone related evidence should be one piece of the puzzle, and not the defining piece of evidence that proves a crime. If all of the other evidence supports the mobile phone forensics, then it seems smart to make use of the evidence. However, if that's all there is to go on, police should think twice before pushing forward.