The Dirty Trick Feds Use To Read Deleted Messages
A court case revealed that law enforcement can recover deleted messages from iPhones using internal notification storage, despite app deletions and disappearing messages, due to a longstanding but unpublicized digital forensics technique.
MAIN POINTS FROM TRANSCRIPT
- Law enforcement can recover deleted messages from iPhones using internal notification storage.
- Notifications, including encrypted messages, are stored at the OS level on iPhones.
- Digital forensics companies have tools to extract these notifications, despite app deletions.
- Apple has not documented how long notifications are stored or under what conditions they're cleared.
TAKEAWAYS
- Deleted messages may still be recoverable from iPhone's internal notification storage.
- The ability to recover notifications has been an open secret in digital forensics.
- Apple has not publicly addressed or documented the notification storage issue.
- Law enforcement can request push notification metadata from Apple, which is valuable despite encryption.