iPhones Seized by Cops Are Rebooting, and No One’s Sure Why
iPhones Seized by Cops Are Rebooting, and No One’s Sure Why
Cops in Detroit are sending out a warning about what they suspect is a new security feature in iOS 18.
If this is indeed a security feature I'm about to buy my first iPhone.
Don't switch to a privacy-violating platform just for a feature found in open source operating systems.
Oh yeah, see they've done it perfectly by having it based on the last time you unlocked your screen.
This makes me even more interested in getting a newer pixel with graphene on it. I had the Pixel 3a back in the day, but have been using other devices since then with lineage. But this right here may very well bring me back. The only thing they need to do is have it on by default and set it to like a long time frame like 24 or 36 hours.
It should be, but it appears to be a bug.
Which is really sad quite frankly and if they did add it as a feature it should have a cooldown period of like 48 hours where it reboots twice in that time frame just so that if a cop turned the setting off it would still not help them
Just use a pattern to lock your phone. Police can't do shit if you have that set up.
It's not the lock, it's the fact that phones are usually encrypted after a reboot (to oversimplify). As the article says you have extra security measures to protect a freshly booted phone.
Android has an app that you can install that auto wipes a phone after X amount of time if the phone hasnt been unlocked:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.lucky.wasted/
Also theres an app that allows you to set a fake password that wipes the phone:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.lucky.duress/
All open source, I have tested these apps on my phones, they work great. The second app about the duress password is a bit glitchy and didnt work on some of my phones.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and setting your phone to automatically wipe itself may be considered destruction of evidence in a court of law.
Nice, I think making your phone go into Before First Unlock mode cannot be considered destruction of evidence
Well they might charge you with "Obstruction of Justice" instead. Then plug it in some cellebrite device and boom, unlocked.
Best way to not have to deal with stuff like this is just to not have the incriminating evidence in the first place. If you are, for example, doing a protest, only chat with contacts in a safe place, then wipe chat logs every time, any data you wish to keep should be encrypted then uploaded anonymously via VPN/Tor and wiped from local storage. Hide the fact that such data exists so you wouldn't have a scenario where the government is trying to get you to give them the data, since they dont even know what data exists. Plausable deniability.
Edit: Those apps I've linked is still a good idea since "Destruction of Evidence" is probably a lesser charge than something like "Rioting".
Thanks but I literally cannot figure out how to use these apps after installing
For the "Wasted" app:
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Check the box saying "Wipe Data" (you can optionally check wipe eSim if yiu also want that to happen)
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Tap the bottom button saying [Off] which would ask you to give permission to the app as a Device Administrator, giving it the power to wipe your device.
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Tap the gear button on top right
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Scroll down to the "Lock" and check that
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Tap the upper left button with the 3 horizontal lines
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Tap the "Lock" menu option
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Enter a value. I personally would use something like 24 or 48 hours. Note that 24H automatically becomes 1D in the app, idk why but thats just some weird quirks with the app.
For the Duress app, it doesn't really work anymore on the phone I'm using, so you might have to do your own testing.
Edit: Make sure you dont get drunk and passed out for 24 hours because then your phone gets wiped lol. Good luck, I didn't make the app so be careful with it, don't blame me if your accidentally get your device wiped when you didnt want it to.
Edit 2: Also you cant really know if these apps works on your particular phone unless you test it yourself, that means wiping it. So you might wanna back up your phone then trigger the wipe to see if it works. Dont wanna get caught at a protest only to find out the app failed.
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Anything to make their job harder is perfectly okay by me. The only thing that would be needed would be for this to be a feature and to have a cool down period of like 48 hours where the phone would reboot twice in that time so that if it was held it would still reboot itself.
Edit: Even better idea. Turning off the feature requires a reboot.
Note to those wishing for such a function, it’s possible by creating an iOS Shortcut - New Shortcut > Shutdown > Change it to ‘Restart’.
From there, you create an automation in Shortcuts to run based on time, location, etc.
Alas, it asks if you want to restart.
You could always take 10 seconds and invoke the operating system's hard shutdown command if you have the 10 seconds to spare. On Android at least, that's pressing and holding power and volume up for 10 seconds. But I do not know what it would be on the iPhone.
It would be best if the function was like if the phone has not been unlocked for at least 16 hours then reboot automatically. A time thing would be a problem though because then it would just reboot every day and that would be no fun.
I saw elsewhere this is a new feature in iOS 18.1, so it will probably pretty solid I’d think. But for shortcut wise, at minimum I suppose one could put automations that trigger when it detected within certain geofences or something… but then whenever you drive by your local police station it will kindly reboot your phone every time lol
this is the police we're talking about, they probably just forgot to charge them and are trying to shift the blame
Whatever it is, incompetence, bug, or feature, I love it.
Hot take: this is actually a bug not a feature.
Which is the saddest part, honestly. If it was a feature, that would be fantastic news. And especially if it had a cooldown feature of like 48 hours, where it would reboot twice in that timeframe, so that if a cop turned off the setting, while it was in their possession, it wouldn't matter because it would reboot anyway.
Speculation is that ios 18 is communicating with other phones while locked to determine security. This can more likely be a NSA/US empire backdoor than a user protection feature. Lowly police systems are just not on the "hacker list". One way the backdoor could work is that if a "NSA/Mossad list phone" is present, protect the other phones, unless the phones are in an NSA/Mossad secure facility.
Someone said it in another thread yesterday, baseband memory leak. The firmware for that shit is terrible, I've had to deal with it in the past.
Apparently, there's at least a chance that it is an intentional feature instead of a bug. There's a comment link below somewhere in this thread that mentions it.
That seems at odds with release notes someone else found.
"new security feature" "warning"
🙂
I guess if you have the 10 seconds to do so, you could invoke the operating system hard reboot function, which at least on Android is pressing and holding power and volume up for 10 seconds. I don't know what it is on the iPhone.
Edit: Too bad there's not some sort of haptic to let you know that it accepted the command before it shuts down though.
The police could just ask Apple, it isn't like they are going to have some secret reboot process that they would hide from the police.
And what would Apple be able to do about it? They don’t have your password*, so they’ll be just as unable to decrypt the device as the police.
*you can give them your password via iCloud I believe but you don’t have to
I'm not saying apple will do anything about it, just that they will let the cops know what is causing the reboots if asked.
Phones that are repeatedly attempted to be unlocked auto hard reset. Been a feature for years.
This is not for devices where the pin has been entered incorrectly too many times. This is for devices that the police have seized and are awaiting forensics to pull data from.
