By James Lomuscio
From incriminating texts and photos to digital evidence once at the scene of a crime, the omnipresent cellphone is proving the best witness for the prosecution, according to law enforcement officials.
Westport Police Det. Marc Heinmiller was among those taking today’s class. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) James Lomuscio for WestportNow.com
And today a dozen detectives from nine towns were into their third full day of a weeklong training session at Westport Police Headquarters on how to use Cellebrite, a leading digital, cellphone forensic program.
“Cellebrite is one of the leaders in the industry,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Richard J. Colangelo as a police officer from another state conducted the class.
Colangelo was joined at a news conference by Westport Police Chief Foti Koskinas and Weston Police Chief Edwin Henion.
Once the weeklong class ends, the detectives will be certified operators of the program, which is housed in the tech-investigating unit of the Weston Police Department.
According to Colangelo, the class will bring the number of trained investigators to 22.
Colangelo helped launch the digital forensic initiative via a federal grant 10 years ago, and when the grant ran out he got the chiefs in the nine towns to pay a participation fee.
Participating towns include Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, New Canaan, Norwalk, Weston, Wilton, Westport and Easton.
“It started out being used for child porn investigations, but now it’s evolved to any crime,” said Weston Capt. Matthew Brodacki, who heads the tech-investigating unit,
A phone’s geolocation can put a suspected burglar at the site of a break-in. Shared text messages can be used in bringing a case against a drug dealer in an overdose death.
It can even shore up a murder conviction, as it did with Kyle Navin for the double murder of his parents whose bodies were found in Weston.
Navin communicated via text not only with his father before his murder, but his girlfriend, Westporter Jennifer Valiante, who was sentenced last week to eight years as an accomplice.
Colangelo stressed cellphone searches require warrants, unless they are voluntarily handed over, as in the case with victims.
“Everybody has their cellphone with them,” Colangelo said, adding that people’s lives are on their phones. “It (the program) extracts information from the phone that the officers can use to investigate.
“It’s not like other forensics,” he added about the digital paper trail.
“It goes into a physical analyzer to look at information, from texts, videos, and it can filter by date, keyword searches. It’s all about getting the guys to search harder and smarter.”
Colangelo said that as the technology has grown, turnaround times for such information has gone from six months to two weeks using the system in Weston.
How much information can be gleaned from a phone? Colangelo says an average 32-gigabyte phone can generate 8,388,605 printed pages.
“This is an excellent tool,” said Westport Det. Marc Heinmiller, who is taking the class. “It’s (the class) bringing me from zero to hopefully at the end of the week to have it up and running.”
Norwalk Det. Dominick Cisero said that before taking the class, “I was just an end user of the reporting.”
“It gives us another tool to aid us in bringing an investigation to a close,” he said.
According to Koskinas, the irony about learning a new program is that the technology is constantly changing.
“As we sat through this, I realized that technology is already getting past us,” he said. “My job is to be proactive. We can’t wait. We need to get ahead of it.
“Every minute that passes that we are not immediately able to investigate, there a potential for a loss of data and evidence,” he added.
