Company Behind San Bernardino iPhone Hack to Fight Texting While Driving

Groundbreaking regulation, proposed in New York, would require individuals involved in traffic accidents to hand their phones to authorities to verify they were not distracted by texting before a collision. The law was sponsored by New York-based lobbying group Distracted Operators Risk Casualties (DORCs).

The change would be made possible through the use of a new system, dubbed the "textalizer" and developed by Israeli forensics and security firm Cellebrite.

The phone had been at the center of a month-long battle between the Feds and iPhone manufacturer Apple, which refused to remove the encryption on the device on freedom of speech and security grounds.

Cellebrite's latest feat could be as controversial: it manages to skirt privacy regulations by ascertaining whether the phone had been texting at a certain point in time, yet keeping any conversations, contacts and other information private.  

The "textalizer" would in fact be a less aggressive version of phone data-scraping gear Cellebrite has already been selling to law enforcement for years.

"Cellebrite has been leading the adoption of field mobile forensics solutions by law enforcement for years, culminating in the formal introduction of our UFED FIELD series product line a year ago," the company's CEO, Jim Grady, said in a statement.

"We look forward to supporting DORCs and law enforcement-both in New York and nationally to curb distracted driving."

According to official data, distracted driving (mostly caused by smartphone usage) is behind at least nine deaths every day, and about 20 percent of traffic accidents overall.

While texting drivers are clearly dangerous, another US state, New Jersey, has even considered fining distracted pedestrians who text as they are walking down the street. 

Walking incidents involving mobile phones accounted for approximately 11,101 injuries in the US between 2000 and 2011.