Entries Tagged "law enforcement"

Page 31 of 46

Randomness at Airport Security

Now this seems to be a great idea:

Security officials at Los Angeles International Airport now have a new weapon in their fight against terrorism: complete, baffling randomness. Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, NEWSWEEK has learned, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable. Now all airport security officials have to do is press a button labeled “Randomize,” and they can throw a sort of digital cloak of invisibility over where they place the cops’ antiterror checkpoints on any given day.

Posted on October 5, 2007 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Photo ID Required to Buy Police Uniforms

In California, if you want to buy a police uniform, you’ll need to prove you’re a policeman:

Assembly Bill 1448 by Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, makes it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine for vendors who do not verify the identification of those purchasing law enforcement uniforms. Previous law made it illegal to impersonate police but did not require an ID check at the point of purchase. The measure takes effect Jan. 1.

Niello said AB 1448 is necessary because many law enforcement agencies require officers to purchase uniforms through outside retailers rather than their own departments.

I’ve written a lot about the problem of authenticating uniforms. This isn’t going to solve that problem. But it’s probably a good idea all the same.

Posted on October 4, 2007 at 1:08 PM • View Comments

More on the German Terrorist Plot

This article is a detailed writeup of the actual investigation. While it seems that intercepted emails were instrumental at several points during the investigation, the article doesn’t explain whether the intercepts were the result of some of the wholesale eavesdropping programs or specifically obtained for this case.

The US intelligence agencies, the NSA and CIA, provided the most important information: copies of messages between German Islamists and their contacts in Pakistan. Three people in Germany were apparently the ones maintaining contact. The first was a man with the pseudonym “Muaz,” who investigators suspected was Islamist Attila S., 22. The second was a man named “Zafer,” from the town of Neunkirchen, who they believed was Zafer S., an old friend of Daniel S., one of the three men arrested last week. According to his father, Hizir S., Zafer is currently attending a language course in Istanbul. The third name that kept reappearing in the emails the NSA intercepted was “Abdul Malik,” a.k.a. Fritz Gelowicz, who prosecutors believe was the ringleader of the German cell, a man Deputy Secretary Hanning calls “cold-blooded and full of hate.”

[…]

While at the Pakistani camp in the spring of 2006, Adem Y. and Gelowicz probably discussed ways to secretly deliver messages from Pakistan to Germany. They used a Yahoo mailbox, but instead of sending messages directly, they would store them in a draft folder through which their fellow Islamists could then access the messages. But it turned out that the method they hit upon had long been known as an al-Qaida ploy. The CIA, NSA and BKA had no trouble monitoring the group’s communications. Two men who went by the aliases “Sule” or “Suley” and “Jaf” kept up the contact from the IJU side.

This is also interesting, given the many discussions on this blog and elsewhere about stopping people watching and photographing potential terrorist targets:

Early in the evening of Dec. 31, 2006, a car containing several passengers drove silently past the Hutier Barracks in Lamboy, a section of the western German city of Hanau. Hanau is known as the home of a major US military base, where thousands of US soldiers live and routinely look forward to celebrating New Year’s Eve in their home away from home. The BfV’s observation team later noted that the car drove back and forth in front of the barracks several times. When German agents finally stopped the car, they discovered that the passengers were Fritz Gelowicz, Attila S. from the southern city of Ulm, Ayhan T. from Langen near Frankfurt and Dana B., a German of Iranian descent from Frankfurt who, when asked what he and the others were doing there, claimed that they had just wanted to see “how the Americans celebrate New Year’s Eve.”

Posted on September 21, 2007 at 4:00 AM • View Comments

London's Security Cameras Don't Help

Interesting article. London’s 10,000 security cameras don’t reduce crime:

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

EDITED TO ADD (10/11): This is a follow-up to a 2005 article.

Posted on September 20, 2007 at 2:03 PM • View Comments

Terrorist Plot Foiled in Germany

Score one for the good guys.

EDITED TO ADD (9/7): The more I read about this, the more obvious it is that intelligence and investigation is what caught these guys, and not any wholesale eavesdropping or data mining programs.

EDITED TO ADD (9/18): This article is a detailed writeup of the actual investigation. While it seems that intercepted emails were instrumental at several points during the investigation, the article doesn’t explain whether the intercepts were the result of some of the wholesale eavesdropping programs or specifically obtained for this case.

Posted on September 6, 2007 at 11:57 AM • View Comments

Computer Forensics Case Study

This is a report on the presentation of computer forensic evidence in a UK trial.

There are three things that concern me here:

  1. The computer was operated by a police officer prior to forensic examination.
  2. The forensic examiner gave an opinion on what files construed “radical Islamic politics.”
  3. The presence of documents”in the “Windows Options” folders was construed as evidence that that someone wanted to hide those documents

In general, computer forensics is rather ad hoc. Traditional rules of evidence are broken all the time. But this seems like a pretty egregious example.

Posted on August 31, 2007 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Thieves Steal Drug-Sniffing Dog

Okay; this is clever:

Rex IV, a highly trained Belgian Malinois sheepdog with a string of drug hauls behind him, was checked on to a flight from Mexico City this week with seven other police dogs bound for an operation in the northern state of Sinaloa.

But when the dogs arrived at Mazatlan airport, Sinaloa, their police handlers discovered a small black mongrel puppy inside Rex IV’s cage, with the sniffer dog nowhere to be seen.

Whatever drug lord ordered that hit probably saved himself a whole lot of grief.

EDITED TO ADD (8/29): The dog was found in a park:

Working on a tip, federal police found Rex IV—a highly trained Belgian Malinois sheepdog with a string of drug hauls to its name—tied to a tree in a park in the gritty Iztapalapa neighborhood, a Public Security Ministry spokesman said.

“When they realized the police were onto them, they abandoned him in a park,” the spokesman told Reuters, adding that the dog’s identity was confirmed by scanning an embedded electronic chip.

Why didn’t they just slit the dog’s throat? I take it back: not so clever.

Posted on August 29, 2007 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

Stupidest Terrorist Overreaction Yet?

What? Are the police taking stupid pills?

Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.

The competition is fierce, but I think this is a winner.

What bothers me most about the news coverage is that there isn’t even a suggestion that the authorities’ response might have been out of line.

Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Translation: We screwed up, and we want someone to pay for our mistake.

Posted on August 27, 2007 at 2:34 PM • View Comments

On the Ineffectiveness of Security Cameras

Information from San Francisco public housing developments:

The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city’s homicides occur on or near public housing property, city officials say.

Nobody monitors the cameras, and the videos are seen only if police specifically request it from San Francisco Housing Authority officials. The cameras have occasionally managed to miss crimes happening in front of them because they were trained in another direction, and footage is particularly grainy at night when most crime occurs, according to police and city officials.

Similar concerns have been raised about the 70 city-owned cameras located at high-crime locations around San Francisco.

[…]

Four homicides have occurred in the past 12 months at the intersection of Laguna and Eddy streets—at the corner of the Plaza East public housing development—including the daytime killing of a 19-year-old in May. A security camera is trained on that corner but so far has not proven useful in making any arrests, Mirkarimi said.

Both the Housing Authority and city have many security cameras in the area, and it wasn’t clear Monday whether the camera in question was purchased by the Housing Authority or city. In any case, the camera hasn’t helped make arrests in the crimes, Mirkarimi said.

“They’re feeling strongly that they don’t work,” Mirkarimi said of Western Addition residents’ views of the security cameras. “They’re just apoplectic why they can’t figure out why nothing comes of this.”

He added that he thinks the cameras may have “a scarecrow effect” in that they give residents the feeling they are safer when they actually have little impact on crime.

That’s not a scarecrow effect. A scarecrow is security theater that works: something that doesn’t actually prevent crime, but deters it by scaring off criminals. Mirkarimi is saying that they have the opposite effect; the cameras make victims feel safer than they really are.

Posted on August 17, 2007 at 1:25 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.