Entries Tagged "law enforcement"

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Massive Police Shootout in Cleveland Despite Lack of Criminals

This is an amazing story. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here’s the basics:

A November car chase ended in a “full blown-out” firefight, with glass and bullets flying, according to Cleveland police officers who described for investigators the chaotic scene at the end of the deadly 25-minute pursuit.

But when the smoky haze—caused by rapid fire of nearly 140 bullets in less than 30 seconds—dissipated, it soon became clear that more than a dozen officers had been firing at one another across a middle school parking lot in East Cleveland.

At the end of the scene, both unarmed—and presumably innocent—people in the car were dead.

There’s a lot that can be said here, but I don’t feel qualified to say it. There’s a whole body of research on decision making under stress—police, firefighters, soldiers—and how easy it is to get caught up in the heat of the moment. I have read one book on that subject, Sources of Power, but that was years ago.

What interests me right now is how this whole situation was colored by what “society” is talking about and afraid of, which became the preconceptions the officers brought to the event. School shootings are in the news, so as soon as the car drove into a school parking lot, the police assumed the worst. Firefights with dangerous criminals are what we see on TV, so that’s not unexpected, either. When you read the story, it’s clear how many of the elements that the officers believed—police cars being rammed, for example—are right out of television violence. This would have turned out very differently if the officers had assumed that, as is almost always true, the two people in the car were just two people in a car.

I’m also curious as to how much technology contributed to this. Reports on the radio brought more and more officers to the scene, and misinformation was broadcast over the radio.

Again, I’m not really qualified to write about any of this. But it’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Posted on February 12, 2013 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

What Facebook Gives the Police

This is what Facebook gives the police in response to a subpoena. (Note that this isn’t in response to a warrant; it’s in response to a subpoena.) This might be the first one of these that has ever become public.

EDITED TO ADD (1/4): Commenters point out that this case is four years old, and that Facebook claims to have revised its policies since then.

Posted on January 4, 2013 at 7:48 AM • View Comments

Becoming a Police Informant in Exchange for a Lighter Sentence

Fascinating article.

Snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at least 48,895 federal convicts—one of every eight—had their prison sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators, a USA TODAY examination of hundreds of thousands of court cases found. The deals can chop a decade or more off of their sentences.

How often informants pay to acquire information from brokers such as Watkins is impossible to know, in part because judges routinely seal court records that could identify them. It almost certainly represents an extreme result of a system that puts strong pressure on defendants to cooperate. Still, Watkins’ case is at least the fourth such scheme to be uncovered in Atlanta alone over the past 20 years.

Those schemes are generally illegal because the people who buy information usually lie to federal agents about where they got it. They also show how staggeringly valuable good information has become—­ prices ran into tens of thousands of dollars, or up to $250,000 in one case, court records show.

There are all sorts of complexities and unintended consequences in this system. This is just a small part of it:

The risks are obvious. If the government rewards paid-for information, wealthy defendants could potentially buy early freedom. Because such a system further muddies the question of how informants—already widely viewed as untrustworthy ­—know what they claim to know, “individual cases can be undermined and the system itself is compromised,” U.S. Justice Department lawyers said in a 2010 court filing.

Plea bargaining is illegal in many countries precisely because of the perverse incentives it sets up. I talk about this more in Liars and Outliers.

Posted on December 28, 2012 at 6:37 AM • View Comments

Information-Age Law Enforcement Techniques

This is an interesting blog post:

Buried inside a recent United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report titled Use of Internet for Terrorist Purposes one can carve out details and examples of law enforcement electronic surveillance techniques that are normally kept secret.

[…]

Point 280: International members of the guerilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) communicated with their counterparts hiding messages inside images with steganography and sending the emails disguised as spam, deleting Internet browsing cache afterwards to make sure that the authorities would not get hold of the data. Spanish and Colombian authorities cooperated to break the encryption keys and successfully deciphered the messages.

[…]

Point 198: It explains how an investigator can circumvent Truecrypt plausible deniability feature (hidden container), advising computer forensics investigators to take into consideration during the computer analysis to check if there is any missing volume of data.

[…]

Point 210: Explains how Remote Administration Trojans (RATs) can be introduced into a suspects computer to collect data or control his computer and it makes reference to hardware and software keyloggers as well as packet sniffers.

There’s more at the above link. Here’s the final report.

Posted on December 19, 2012 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

Is iPhone Security Really this Good?

Simson Garfinkel writes that the iPhone has such good security that the police can’t use it for forensics anymore:

Technologies the company has adopted protect Apple customers’ content so well that in many situations it’s impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals. Most significant is the increasing use of encryption, which is beginning to cause problems for law enforcement agencies when they encounter systems with encrypted drives.

“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”

Yes, I believe that full-disk encryption—whether Apple’s FileVault or Microsoft’s BitLocker (I don’t know what the iOS system is called)—is good; but its security is only as good as the user is at choosing a good password.

The iPhone always supported a PIN lock, but the PIN wasn’t a deterrent to a serious attacker until the iPhone 3GS. Because those early phones didn’t use their hardware to perform encryption, a skilled investigator could hack into the phone, dump its flash memory, and directly access the phone’s address book, e-mail messages, and other information. But now, with Apple’s more sophisticated approach to encryption, investigators who want to examine data on a phone have to try every possible PIN. Examiners perform these so-called brute-force attacks with special software, because the iPhone can be programmed to wipe itself if the wrong PIN is provided more than 10 times in a row. This software must be run on the iPhone itself, limiting the guessing speed to 80 milliseconds per PIN. Trying all four-digit PINs therefore requires no more than 800 seconds, a little more than 13 minutes. However, if the user chooses a six-digit PIN, the maximum time required would be 22 hours; a nine-digit PIN would require 2.5 years, and a 10-digit pin would take 25 years. That’s good enough for most corporate secrets—and probably good enough for most criminals as well.

Leaving aside the user practice questions—my guess is that very few users, even those with something to hide, use a ten-digit PIN—could this possibly be true? In the introduction to Applied Cryptography, almost 20 years ago, I wrote: “There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.”

Since then, I’ve learned two things: 1) there are a lot of gradients to kid sister cryptography, and 2) major government cryptography is very hard to get right. It’s not the cryptography; it’s everything around the cryptography. I said as much in the preface to Secrets and Lies in 2000:

Cryptography is a branch of mathematics. And like all mathematics, it involves numbers, equations, and logic. Security, palpable security that you or I might find useful in our lives, involves people: things people know, relationships between people, people and how they relate to machines. Digital security involves computers: complex, unstable, buggy computers.

Mathematics is perfect; reality is subjective. Mathematics is defined; computers are ornery. Mathematics is logical; people are erratic, capricious, and barely comprehensible.

If, in fact, we’ve finally achieved something resembling this level of security for our computers and handheld computing devices, this is something to celebrate.

But I’m skeptical.

Another article.

Slashdot has a thread on the article.

EDITED TO ADD: More analysis. And Elcomsoft can crack iPhones.

Posted on August 21, 2012 at 1:42 PM • View Comments

Police Sting Operation Yields No Mobile Phone Thefts

Police in Hastings, in the UK, outfitted mobile phones with tracking devices and left them in bars and restaurants, hoping to catch mobile phone thieves in the act. But no one stole them:

Nine premises were visited in total and officers were delighted that not one of the bait phones was ‘stolen’. In fact, on nearly every occasion good hearted members of the public handed them to bar or security staff.

I’m not sure about the headline: “Operation Mobli deters mobile phone thieves in Hastings.”

There are two things going on here. One, people are generally nice and will return property to its rightful owner. Two, it’s hard for the average person to profit from a stolen cell phone. He already has a cell phone that’s assigned to his phone number. He doesn’t really know if he can sell a random phone, especially one assigned to the number of someone who had her phone stolen. Yes, professional phone thieves know what to do, but what’s the odds that one of those is dining out in Hastings on a particular night?

Posted on July 26, 2012 at 6:55 AM • View Comments

The Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimony

Interesting article:

The reliability of witness testimony is a vastly complex subject, but legal scholars and forensic psychologists say it’s possible to extract the truth from contradictory accounts and evolving memories. According to Barbara Tversky, professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University, the bottom line is this: “All other things equal, earlier recountings are more likely to be accurate than later ones. The longer the delay, the more likely that subsequent information will get confused with the target memory.”

[…]

Memory is a reconstructive process, says Richard Wise, a forensic psychologist at the University of North Dakota. “When an eyewitness recalls a crime, he or she must reconstruct his or her memory of the crime.” This, he says, is an unconscious process. To reconstruct a memory, the eyewitness draws upon several sources of information, only one being his or her actual recollection.

“To fill in gaps in memory, the eyewitness relies upon his or her expectation, attitudes, prejudices, bias, and prior knowledge. Furthermore, information supplied to an eyewitness after a crime (i.e., post-event information) by the police, prosecutor, other eyewitnesses, media, etc., can alter an eyewitness’s memory of the crime,” Wise said in an email.

That external input is what makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable. Eyewitnesses are generally unaware that their memory has been altered by post-event information, and feel convinced they’re recalling only the incident itself. “Once an eyewitness’s memory of the crime has been altered by post-event information, it is difficult or impossible to restore the eyewitness’s original memory of the crime,” Wise told Life’s Little Mysteries.

Posted on June 4, 2012 at 6:36 AM • View Comments

The Banality of Surveillance Photos

Interesting essay on a trove on surveillance photos from Cold War-era Prague.

Cops, even secret cops, are for the most part ordinary people. Working stiffs concerned with holding down jobs and earning a living. Even those who thought it was important to find enemies recognized the absurdity of their task.

I take photos all the time and these empty blurry frames tell me that they were made intentionally. Shot out of boredom, as little acts of defiance, the secret police wandered the streets of Prague for twenty years taking lousy pictures of people from far away because a job is a job.

Occasionally something interesting happened, like spotting a hot stylish, American made Ford Mustang Sally. However, it must have been an awful job, with dull days that turned into months and years, of killing time between lunch and dinner.

Posted on May 24, 2012 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.