Marble Falls, Burnet police partner on phone-cracking technology
The Marble Falls and Burnet police departments are splitting the cost and use of new software that will allow them to access locked phones to acquire evidence when necessary.
MFPD and BPD will split the annual $20,000 contract with digital forensics firm Cellebrite down the middle. The deal gives each department 20 phone “cracks” a year and unlimited access to phone data analysis.
“The folks that we’re dealing with nowadays are not doing their nefarious business on desktop computers; they’re doing it on their smartphones,” Marble Falls Police Chief Glenn Hanson told the City Council during its meeting Tuesday, Sept. 17. “The evidence that we need to be able to prosecute the crimes that we are looking at are most often found on these phones.”
Hanson explained that the technology would be utilized only when absolutely necessary because the contract limits uses to 20 a year for each department.
Law enforcement agencies need a search warrant to access a locked phone without permission from the owner, but if a person gives consent to access, the Cellebrite technology can be used to analyze a phone’s data without burning through one of the 20 cracks.
Without the technology, the MFPD would not be able to access locked phones without help from another agency, like the Texas Department of Public Safety, Hanson said.
DPS can take up to two years to produce needed information due to the long wait list, which can prolong investigations and even snuff them out because of the statute of limitations on certain crimes, Hanson continued.
“When we do come across an issue where we really need this, and we need it now, it’s really frustrating to know that we can’t get it,” he said. “A lot of cases might be dead in the water if we didn’t have the ability to get evidence, and digital evidence is the name of the game these days,”