Entries Tagged "law enforcement"

Page 27 of 46

Automatic Profiling Is Useless

No surprise:

Automated passenger profiling is rubbish, the Home Office has conceded in an amusing—and we presume inadvertent—blurt. “Attempts at automated profiling have been used in trial operations [at UK ports of entry] and has proved [sic] that the systems and technology available are of limited use,” says home secretary Jacqui Smith in her response to Lord Carlile’s latest terror legislation review.

The U.S. wants to do it anyway:

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial or ethnic groups.

I’ve written about profiling before.

Posted on July 7, 2008 at 1:37 PM • View Comments

Tourists, Not Terrorists

Remember the two men who were exhibiting “unusual behavior” on a Washington-state ferry last summer?

The agency’s Seattle field office, along with the Washington Joint Analytical Center, was still seeking the men’s identities and whereabouts Wednesday as ferry service was temporarily shutdown when a suspicious package was found in a ferry bathroom and taken away by authorities.

“We had various independent reports from passengers and ferry employees that these two guys were engaging in what they described as unusual activities on the ferries,” Special Agent Robbie Burroughs, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Washington state, told FOXNews.com.

“They felt that these guys were showing an undue interest in the boat itself, in the layout, the workers and the terminal, and it caused them enough concern that they contacted law enforcement about it,” she told FOXNews.com.

The two were photographed by a ferry employee about a month ago, and those photographs were distributed to ferry employees three weeks ago by local law enforcement.

Turns out they were tourists, not terrorists:

Turns out the men, both citizens of a European Union nation, were captivated by the car-carrying capacity of local ferries.

“Where these gentlemen live, they don’t have vehicle ferries. They were fascinated that a ferry could hold that many cars and wanted to show folks back home,” FBI Special Agent Robbie Burroughs said Monday.

[…]

Two weeks ago, the men appeared at a U.S. Embassy and identified themselves as the men in the photo released to the media in August, a couple of weeks after they took a ferry from Seattle to Vashon Island during a business trip, Burroughs said.

They came forward because they worried they’d be arrested if they traveled to the U.S. and so provided proof of their identities, employment and the reason for their July trip to Seattle, according to the FBI.

Posted on May 8, 2008 at 7:32 AM • View Comments

London's Cameras Don't Reduce Crime

News here and here:

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

[…]

Use of CCTV images for court evidence has so far been very poor, according to Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, the officer in charge of the Metropolitan police unit. “CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure,” Neville told the Security Document World Conference in London. “Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.”

This is, of course is absolutely no surprise.

Posted on May 7, 2008 at 6:53 AM • View Comments

Microsoft Has Developed Windows Forensic Analysis Tool for Police

Really:

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer’s Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

More news here. Commentary here.

How long before this device is in the hands of the hacker community? Days? Months? They had it before it was released?

EDITED TO ADD (4/30): Seems that these are not Microsoft-developed tools:

COFEE, according to forensic folk who have used it, is simply a suite of 150 bundled off-the-shelf forensic tools that run from a script. None of the tools are new or were created by Microsoft. Microsoft simply combined existing programs into a portable tool that can be used in the field before agents bring a computer back to their forensic lab.

Microsoft wouldn’t disclose which tools are in the suite other than that they’re all publicly available, but a forensic expert told me that when he tested the product last year it included standard forensic products like Windows Forensic Toolchest (WFT) and RootkitRevealer.

With COFEE, a forensic agent can select, through the interface, which of the 150 investigative tools he wants to run on a targeted machine. COFEE creates a script and copies it to the USB device which is then plugged into the targeted machine. The advantage is that instead of having to run each tool separately, a forensic investigator can run them all through the script much more quickly and can also grab information (such as data temporarily stored in RAM or network connection information) that might otherwise be lost if he had to disconnect a machine and drag it to a forensics lab before he could examine it.

And it’s certainly not a back door, as TechDirt claims.

But given that a Federal court has ruled that border guards can search laptop computers without cause, this tool might see wider use than Microsoft anticipated.

Posted on April 30, 2008 at 1:54 PM • View Comments

More RIPA Creep

I previously blogged about the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which was sold as a means to tackle terrorism, and other serious crimes, being used against animal rights protestors. The latest news from the UK is that a local council has used provisions of the act to put a couple and their children under surveillance, for “suspected fraudulent school place applications”:

Poole council said it used the legislation to watch a family at home and in their daily movements because it wanted to know if they lived in the catchment area for a school, which they wanted their three-year-old daughter to attend.

This kind of thing happens again and again. When campaigning for a law’s passage, the authorities invoke the most heinous of criminals—terrorists, kidnappers, drug dealers, child pornographers—but after the law is passed, they start using it in more mundane situations.

Another article. And this follow-up.

Posted on April 15, 2008 at 1:04 PM • View Comments

Seat Belt Usage and Compensating Behavior

There is a theory that people have an inherent risk thermostat that seeks out an optimal level of risk. When something becomes inherently safer—a law is passed requiring motorcycle riders to wear helmets, for example—people compensate by riding more recklessly. I first read this theory in a 1999 paper by John Adams at the University of Reading, although it seems to have originated with Sam Peltzman.

In any case, this paper presents data that contradicts that thesis:

Abstract—This paper investigates the effects of mandatory seat belt laws on driver behavior and traffic fatalities. Using a unique panel data set on seat belt usage in all U.S. jurisdictions, we analyze how such laws, by influencing seat belt use, affect the incidence of traffic fatalities. Allowing for the endogeneity of seat belt usage, we find that such usage decreases overall traffic fatalities. The magnitude of this effect, however, is significantly smaller than the estimate used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In addition, we do not find significant support for the compensating-behavior theory, which suggests that seat belt use also has an indirect adverse effect on fatalities by encouraging careless driving. Finally, we identify factors, especially the type of enforcement used, that make seat belt laws more effective in increasing seat belt usage.

Posted on April 11, 2008 at 1:44 PM • View Comments

Terroristic Threatening

What in the world is “terroristic threatening“?

The woman was also charged with one count of terroristic threatening for pointing a handgun at an officer, said university police Maj. Kenny Brown. The woman gave her handgun to a counselor at the health services building, he said.

We are all hurt by the application of the word “terrorist” to everything we don’t like. Terrorism does not equal criminality.

Posted on April 4, 2008 at 11:19 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.