All of a sudden I just recalled Breaking Bad and how there were scenes of characters using “burner phone,” that is, a pay-as-you-go cellular telephone that you paid for with cash at like a Radio Shack or somewhere. When we had overseas visitors, getting a cheap phone and recharging minutes at a Radio Shack was very convenient. They were everywhere, for one thing, (and they didn’t check your identity or anything). (sigh I miss Radio Shack for so many reasons).
Very often, characters were shown breaking (clamshell) phones in half and throwing the pieces into the desert.
I don’t even know whether you can still buy a pay-as-you-go cell phone without identification or something, but what occurred to me is whether breaking the phone in half would actually be any more secure than just throwing it away whole.
But I suspect that if you can source replacement internal cables, the two halves are intact and still contain any info they contained at the moment of “death”. Find both halves, replace the destroyed interconnect cables, and the phone would almost certainly boot and yield information as readily as it would if it had been lost intact.
I have repaired a lot of electronics, including some clamshell non-telephone devices which had been brolen apart (Nintendo DS that got in the middle of a fight between angry children), and they were all fine after replacing the destroyed interconnects.
Turning it off would probably do the same thing, but breaking it would almost guarantee some random person doesn’t pick it up and reconnect it to the world.
I sometimes see them pulling the sim card and destroying it in shows.
Secure in what sense? The network already knows that phone #12345 called the following numbers at the following times at the following locations and spoke for however long. Now, if they find identifiable pieces of that phone, broken or not, with your fingerprints on them, that could be taken as evidence that the phone was in your possession and you made the calls. I have no idea if that is critically important information worth combing the desert for those pieces. I would imagine they typically already know who is associated with El Jefazo [and possibly have them under surveillance, including calls] and don’t add people to the watch list solely because someone found a broken phone out in the middle of nowhere and handed it to the FBI for some reason.
Story time. Many years ago, when clamshell/flip phones were common I watched a scene one night outside of a bar.
Several guys were hanging out, and one of them somehow managed to break his phone in half while he was on a call (one can assume alcohol was involved). I didn’t see exactly how, because I wasn’t paying attention until the guy starts yelling into his phone the appropriate curses, and telling the person on the other end to call one of the other guys. A few seconds later one of the other guy’s phone rings, and the one half of the conversation went, “that’s crazy, you could hear him? His phone was busted in half so he couldn’t hear you! We’re outside the bar! He broke his phone!”
So, for some small definition of “work” in at least this one case, the phone continued to work, even though the half with the screen and earpiece was no longer connected to the part with the buttons,microphone, and obviously the battery and motherboard.
As for what the Breaking Bad style snapping the phone in half accomplishes, the only thing I can imagine is @sitchensis assertion that it prevents somebody else from using it. Call logs and voicemails are stored at the carrier. Text messages stored on the phone could be recovered by either repairing the phone, or if it will turn on just connecting a USB cable and pulling them off.
In the shows, I don’t think the idea is “I’m going to break it so no one can figure out what I was doing.” It’s “I’m going to break it and leave it here in case someone was tracking me by it.”
I would expect most of the important guts of a flip phone would be in the lower half, with the upper half given over to screen, speaker, antenna, and maybe camera. Breaking it wouldn’t be a guaranteed way to make it stop working, as in echoreply’s story. That phone was still transmitting and the microphone was still working despite being broken in half. The best thing to do would be to take the battery out, remove the SIM card, and break the phone in half. That would ensure it’s no longer transmitting a signal that can be tracked, it can’t be easily put back together again, and it can’t be easily traced to a specific wireless account (although there is still an IMEI number attached to the phone).
Yes, most likely the thinner top half was ust the ear speaker. The whole guts - number pad, radio, microphone, etc. - is in the lower half (which is probably fatter). So all Mr> Intoxicated did was break off the ear speaker piece.
Basically - if you completely turn off the phone (with modern Phones, the “slide to turn off” it is no longer live and waiting for calls, pinging the cell tower, etc. Cannot be traced.) Breaking it in half without turning it off likely leaves it still pinging the cell tower until the battery dies. Completely smashing the phone probably ensures the raido function stops; and as I understand, modern cellphones are well encrypted so recovering the memory chips intact off the circuit board may not be informative. (The FBI allegedly has numerous intact cellphones where they cannot read the contents due to lock encryption)
This is all just drama. From shards of the phone, there is probably a sticker with the IMEI number on it. This should allow the FBI to connect the phone to a device used on the cell network, and hence the call log. The SIM card is also uniquely identifiable, so not fully trashing that could also allow the phone data to be discovered and connected to the phone company logs.
(Textx between phones should also be logged, but note texts between iPhones may instead use the Apple iMessage which is totally encrypted and so not in the phone company logs - but needs an Apple ID at each end tied to an email, which is also discoverable, etc. etc. Deeper and deeper…
if you watch Law & Order or any of the FBI shows, or Chicago PD (the show where they only beat the crap out of bad guys) what do they do? They don’t wiretap calls, they get the call log data and analyze it. Identifying one phone can lead them to the whole gang, and then to anyone outside the burner group that was called, etc. The usual drama nowadays has the perps only calling among a set of 2 or 3 burners.
Phones have a unique ID - International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI). SIM cards provide an additional ID that allows the various cells and carriers to negotiate routing of a cell and charging for the call. So there are two IDs in play. Criminals that played musical SIM cards in the same phone were just plain stupid.
As noted above, just smashing a phone would be little to nothing to remove useful information. Forensic electronics would have little trouble getting every last bit of data stored on the phone back. Even removing the battery will not help a great deal. Manufactures very nicely try quite hard to ensure even the dumbest of phones didn’t lose their owners data. The IMEI will be very hard to remove, and provide a long lasting trail.
Here in Oz burner SIMs are pretty well impossible to obtain. Not legally. You need a substantial amount of ID to prove who you are in order to get a SIM card. No SIM card, phone no work. So buying a SIM free phone doesn’t get you very far. Most phones are now sold SIM free anyway. Most people already have a phone number and are not interested in a new one. The down side to the requirements for substantial ID came home to roost a few weeks ago, as a major telco got compromised, and a large swag of customer data stolen. Including all the identification information used to validate their ID in the first place. Nasty.
An iPhone will use SMS and MMS, if it can’t access an Apple ID. A colleague of mine has an iPhone, and resolutely refuses to register an Aplle ID for himself. Communicating with him from my iPhone shows messages to him in green. Although he has an iPhone as well, there is no Apple ID associated with his number. Indeed, as iPhone owners will have experienced, if they somehow log out from their iMessage system, they are reverted back to SMS/MMS for all messaging.
iMessage uses a different (proprietary) protocol from SMS and MMS. It needs an Apple ID to route messages. Messages are encrypted with keys managed by the Apple ID system. No Apple ID, no encrypted channel, no iMessage.
I guess the main point is that there are plenty of threads attached to any cellphone which law enforcement can follow - the phone’s IMEI, leading to where it was purchased, how and when, then the SIM card and its provenance, the money used to buy time (assuming it’s pay-as-you-go), what numbers it talked to, any text, what cell towers it pinged off; and one cellphone leads to the others it talked to, with the same range of data available from those phones, etc.
SIM cards, if recovered intact, include an amount of data - contact lists, possibly old text messages, etc. as well as the phone number for the phone.
Just curious with Australian SIM requirements - do they then require anyone reselling a SIM card to follow certain guidelines? What ID would you have to provide to buy a card if under 16? I imagine a market in “lost” SIM cards…
There’s he story that the NSA tracked a number of Middle East terrorists through their SIM cards. Apparently you could buy SIM cards in Switzerland from some vendors that were allegedly “untraceable”. In reality, this just meant the buyer did not have to provide ID - but once the card was being used, call records were as easily followed no different than other SIM. In fact, it was easier to identify members of some organizations because their phones used cards from this vendor…
They most certainly do sell “burner” pay as you go phones. Straight talk has them at Walmart. The simple flip phone is $30 even and the monthly plan is $30 that you load via a pre-paid card. No ID check is done, you can use strictly cash, and you can set up pretty much use any area code you want. So while you are calling someone from Detroit the area code could be L.A… Not only do drug dealers use them, police use them as well during investigations. If all you need to do is talk and text $30 for a phone is a pretty good deal.
Would it be more efficient to throw the intact phone into the bed of a passing truck or give it to a random homeless person to muddle the trail? I’ve heard of fugitives giving away their credit cards in an attempt to misdirect police.