NYC Mayor Adams’ Indictment Offers a Few Lessons in Smartphone Security
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The federal criminal indictment unsealed Thursday morning against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in the Southern District of New York reveals a great deal about the Democratic mayor’s alleged fondness for Turkish Airlines business class. But it also surfaces three security escapades much closer to home.
The indictment’s five counts of bribery, fraud, and campaign-finance offenses allege that Adams placed his thumb on government scales to help Turkish government and business interests in NYC, in return for which the mayor received more than $123,000 in free travel and other treats.
(Adams apparently enjoyed the Turkish Airlines inflight experience so much, per the indictment, that he asked if he could fly Turkish from New York to Easter Island. Sadly, that destination is not on the airline’s route map.)
This 57-page “United States of America v. Adams” PDF describes attempts to conceal the alleged crimes that went beyond not disclosing the freebies and having Turkish interests launder illegal campaign donations through “straw donors.”
First, federal investigators obtained message records that show Adams, a former NYPD officer, admitting that he conspired to delete other conversations by answering a staffer’s “Please Delete all messages you send me” request with a two-word reply: “Always do.” It’s hard to think of messaging metadata more incriminating than a conversation confirming a plot to delete message records.
Second, the indictment recounts an additional case of message erasure in which the same staffer took a bathroom break during a voluntary interview with FBI agents and used that alone time to delete “the encrypted messaging applications she had used to communicate with Adams, the Promoter, the Turkish Official, the Airline Manager, and others.”
Many private messaging applications automatically back up content to cloud storage, but the indictment does not clarify if this was the case with whatever apps the staffer had used.
Third, the indictment accuses Adams himself of tampering with evidence in his own pocket by changing the passcode on his smartphone (it doesn’t identify the model) from four to six digits and then telling investigators that those new numbers had fled his memory.
“Adams had done this, he claimed, to prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone because, according to Adams, he wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the investigation. But, Adams further claimed, he had forgotten the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone.”
Had the mayor kept his phone locked with biometric security, he could have been compelled to unlock it that way. That’s why one of the most frequent bits of advice to protestors and to people crossing international borders is to use the Android and iOS shortcuts that disable biometric unlocking. But Adams could also have simply invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“If you use a biometric, you can be compelled to decrypt your device for law enforcement because a biometric is something you are,” lawyer Riana Pfefferkorn said in a 2019 talk at the Defcon security conference. “If you use a passcode to decrypt, typically, you can’t be compelled to unlock, because a passcode is something that you know.”
Her talk did not cover how claiming to have forgotten a passcode would affect those issues.
In either case, with Adams’ phone now in possession of federal investigators, he faces the risk of them determining the unlock code through other means, like using such third-party tools as Cellebrite’s unlocking kits to defeat the phone’s security.
In conclusion: PCMag does not endorse taking free travel from foreign interests in exchange for illicit influence on policy (should you want to fly like Adams, please research how frequent-travel miles and points can pay for those luxury experiences) but does advise awareness of the privacy risks involved in having so much of your life stored in devices you take everywhere.
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