Devices being remotely wiped in police custody

&gt; &quot;We have cases where phones get seized, and they are not necessarily taken from an arrested person - but we don&#x27;t know the details of these cases as there is not a reason to keep records of this,&quot; she added.<p>Christ, this is the real story. Police seize items that don&#x27;t belong to a suspect, apparently aren&#x27;t important to an investigation, don&#x27;t give them back to the owner, and don&#x27;t keep records about these items.

As the article makes clear, they&#x27;re just incompetent. However police-types seem to be very conservative by nature which can lead to a very technophobic workforce.<p>It is pretty surprising how slowly police are changing with the times. You&#x27;d expect every major police force to have a &quot;computer crimes&quot; division, but they don&#x27;t. Only really the MET (London&#x27;s police force) has a decent computer crimes division.<p>You often read about digital crimes (e.g. harassment, theft, fraud, etc) going completely uninvestigated because of how few &quot;digital police&quot; they have (e.g. 1&#x2F;1000th the size of the officers investigating physical crimes).<p>As a specific example, for almost a year when you Googled &quot;UK passport renew&quot; the first Google adword result was an obviously fraudulent one, yet nothing was done even though they had to have known about it.<p>PS - I bet you could use Tasker (or a similar app) to wipe your phone if it didn&#x27;t regain data access for a long period of time (e.g. 6-12 hours). So if they took your phone and shoved it into a bag, the phone still auto-wipes if they fail to turn it off.<p>PPS - Although realistically you&#x27;re best not storing the data on your phone at all. The UK police can force you to give up your encryption keys, however they would struggle to get your data off of a foreign owned-operated website.

The comment about putting devices into a microwave is false.<p>If the microwave is from the 70&#x27;s it will work, otherwise it will not.<p>Don&#x27;t believe me&#x2F;want to downvote me? Put your cell phone in the microwave and call it from a land line...

My takeaway was that somebody is selling a hard drive that will wipe itself if you go through a tunnel.

&gt; pop it in a microwave oven<p>Just popped my phone in the microwave oven. Was able to receive a call on 2G as well as 3G.

Interesting article. I didn&#x27;t realise &quot;romance fraud&quot; was a thing.

From the article: &quot;A spokeswoman for Dorset police told the BBC: &quot;There were six incidents, but we don&#x27;t know how people wiped them.&quot;<p>You&#x27;d think the police would know that some smartphones have a remote-wipe or kill-switch feature: it&#x27;s something they&#x27;d tell people who report their smartphone stolen.

Article provided courtesy of SecureDrives

This reminds me of a movie scene in Breaking Bad where they remotely &quot;wiped&quot; a laptop&#x27;s content. Guess that&#x27;s plausible now.

&quot;The hard drive is constantly looking for GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] signals, if it is starved of them it it would destroy itself. It would see such a bag as a threat,&quot; said James Little, head of sales at SecureDrives&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t take your laptop on the subway!

Maybe slightly off topic, is there a program that would allow me to remote wipe a system if one gets stolen? Or automatically wipe out a system if it has not communicated with a central server for a set amount of time?

&gt;If we can&#x27;t get to the scene within an hour, we tell the client to pop it in a microwave oven<p>Doesn&#x27;t just switching it off achieve the same thing?

Is it even possible with the battery taken out?