“If somebody goes missing, first thing they want to have a look at is the cellphone. Should they catch a bank robber, the vital thing they'll wish to grab is the cellphone. A suicide? One thing to merely see is their cellphone.”
ST. GEORGE — Gathering evidence with a crime scene is key to solving an instance. Officers meticulously hunt for clues, large and small.
Currently, one of the primary things they look for are cellphones. That’s where Dixie State University is available in.
During its criminal justice program, the college offers courses in digital forensics, that is the extraction of evidence from electronic devices.
“If somebody goes missing, initial thing to merely look at is their cellphone,” said William Matthews, director in the Computer Crime Institute at Dixie State University. “As long as they catch a bank robber, the vital thing they'll would like to grab is their cellphone. A suicide? One thing they need to see is cellphone.”
Mathews saw any excuses for this rice. But not many agencies, such as FBI plus the National Security Agency, were doing this kind of work. Along with the turnaround time was long.
This season, Dixie State University was awarded instruction Excellence federal grant to ascertain an electronic forensics program. The university says it’s the only person in the state, the other of only two such programs in the united states.
With the funding in position, Matthews fix this software, emphasizing retrieving data from cellphones which can help police agencies of their investigations.
The phones are processed quickly. Mathews and his students have obtained many cellphones of every make, model and os from agencies from coast to coast.
“We specialize in cellphones which have been ‘problem’ phones,” he was quoted saying. “Phones which have been either password protected, broken, or other sorts of circumstance which make it to ensure that police can't see the phone."
They will use the chip-off technique, where they eliminate the memory chip on the phone and examine that apart from the main system with the phone, that enables them to bypass the password.
"If it's successful, we'll get all the call history, all of the SMS messages, the MMS messages, videos, pictures, everything that's stored within the phone,” Mathews said.
Everything that data are then copied and returned on the police agency conducting the investigation.
Mathews said he remembered an underage sex crime case which was a "he said-she said" case. The cellphone was password protected, so there wasn’t much that police could do.
“So the phone sat in evidence for why not a year, after which it they heard about our lab,” he explained. “They sent the cellphone. We extracted the chip, which bypassed the password, and then we downloaded all the data from the phone. We recovered videos pictures and everything off of the phone, so sent them back to the officer, and subsequently the man was charged.”
In many instances, the cellphone data aren’t the smoking gun, but it really what food was in this example. Quite often, info on the phones is needed to build up other leads, Mathews said.
The technology to examine the cellphones can be quite expensive and not within the budgets of most police agencies. Plus, most agencies wouldn't likely work with it often enough to warrant the charge.
“With the lab inside state, its not all agency needs to pip out. They will send the phones to us and we can examine them,” Mathews said.
The main focus of the lab is to support Utah police agencies, however they don't realize phones from other states. The examination of the telephone is completed free of charge.
Mathews' digital forensics courses have become extremely popular among students majoring in criminal justice. He's got five classes this semester, and they're all full.
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