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Watch out for these FBI honeypot phones if you like to do crimes
This modified Pixel 4a is a narc phone. An Android policeman, you might say
Criminals use cell phones. And because police agencies know this, they tend to be a little more cautious about said phones than regular users. Cautious enough to, say, buy a special fully-encrypted phone that purports to be 100% untraceable, and use the completely hack-proof messaging app contained within. Some of those criminals came to regret it as they discovered their super-secret phones and messaging service were, in fact, provided by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and other police forces around the world.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced the addition of a new alert program, Blue Alert, to the nation's emergency alerting systems. The new service is intended to notify the public of threats to law enforcement in real time. With the creation of a dedicated Blue Alert event code in the Emergency Alert System, state and local law enforcement will have the capability to push immediate warnings out to the public via broadcast, cable, and satellite providers, as well as to consumer smartphones through the Wireless Emergency Alert system.
Each year in the US, it's estimated that somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people are victims of human trafficking, mostly for some form of prostitution or abusive labor. A disproportionate amount of these victims are women, children, and immigrants. Law enforcement agencies and non-profit groups all over the country attempt to stop the trade of human lives, but the clandestine nature of the operators and the cooperation of apparently legitimate businesses makes actual tracking and prosecution difficult, and only a tiny fraction of the estimated victims are freed.
Writing for Android Police from my home office in Virginia, it's not every day that I get to report on something somewhat close to home. But here it is. A Virginia Circuit Court judge has ruled that while police officers cannot compel a person to give up their passcode, they can demand someone use their fingerprint to unlock their phone.
At the Google I/O 2014 keynote, Sundar Pichai took to the stage to let us know that the L release of Android is set to make massive improvements in security for the enterprise as well as regular users. The Washington Post has received word from Google that gives us another glimpse of what we should expect in the next version. It seems that devices shipping with Android L will have disk encryption enabled by default. The move is pegged as a step to prevent law enforcement officers from obtaining information from phones and tablets without an owner's consent. Apple just made the same change in iOS 8, released earlier today.