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Page 11 of 29

Detecting Psychopaths by their Speech Patterns

The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail. Using computer programs to analyze what the men said, the researchers found that those with psychopathic scores showed a lack of emotion, spoke in terms of cause-and-effect when describing their crimes, and focused their attention on basic needs, such as food, drink and money.

[…]

To examine the emotional content of the murderers’ speech, Hancock and his colleagues looked at a number of factors, including how frequently they described their crimes using the past tense. The use of the past tense can be an indicator of psychological detachment, and the researchers found that the psychopaths used it more than the present tense when compared with the nonpsychopaths. They also found more dysfluencies—the “uhs” and “ums” that interrupt speech—among psychopaths. Nearly universal in speech, dysfluencies indicate that the speaker needs some time to think about what they are saying.

I worry about people being judged by these criteria. Psychopaths make up about 1% of the population, so even a small false-positive rate can be a significant problem.

Posted on November 17, 2011 at 6:37 AM • View Comments

Weaponized UAV Drones in the Hands of Local Police

Why does anyone think this is a good idea?

The police in Montgomery County – and area north of Houston, Texas – is the first local police in the united States to deploy a drone that can carry weapons.

[…]

He said they are designed to carry weapons for local law enforcement. “The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems,” he said, including Tazers that can send a jolt to a criminal on the ground or a gun that fires bean bags known as a “stun baton.”

“You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft. A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect,” he said.

I’m sure it works much better in the movies than it does in real life.

Posted on November 4, 2011 at 5:05 AM • View Comments

Cell Phone Surveillance System

I was not surprised that police forces are buying this system, but at its capabilities.

Britain’s largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.

The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as “Listed X”, it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person’s movements in real time.

[…]

Datong’s website says its products are designed to provide law enforcement, military, security agencies and special forces with the means to “gather early intelligence in order to identify and anticipate threat and illegal activity before it can be deployed”.

The company’s systems, showcased at the DSEi arms fair in east London last month, allow authorities to intercept SMS messages and phone calls by secretly duping mobile phones within range into operating on a false network, where they can be subjected to “intelligent denial of service”. This function is designed to cut off a phone used as a trigger for an explosive device.

A transceiver around the size of a suitcase can be placed in a vehicle or at another static location and operated remotely by officers wirelessly. Datong also offers clandestine portable transceivers with “covered antennae options available”. Datong sells its products to nearly 40 countries around the world, including in Eastern Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

Company website.

Posted on October 31, 2011 at 12:29 PM • View Comments

Demands from Law Enforcement for Google Data

Google releases statistics:

Google received more than 15,600 requests in the January-June period, 10 percent more than the final six months of last year. The requests in the latest period spanned more than 25,400 individual accounts worldwide – a tiny fraction of Google’s more than billion users.

[…]

The highest volume of government demands for user data came from the U.S. (5,950 requests, a 29 percent increase from the previous six-month stretch); India (1,739 requests, up 2 percent); France (1,300 requests, up 27 percent); Britain (1,273 requests, up 10 percent); and Germany (1,060 requests, up 38 percent).

[…]

The company usually complies with at least a portion of most government demands. Google has said that it often has little choice because it must obey laws in the countries where it operates. The alternative is to leave, as it did last year when it shifted its search engine to Hong Kong so it wouldn’t have to follow mainland China’s censorship requirements.

In the U.S., Google gave federal, state and other agencies what they wanted 93 percent of the time. The nearly 6,000 requests affected more than 11,000 user accounts during the January-June period.

In India, Google honored 70 percent of the 1,739 requests, which targeted more than 2,400 users, the second highest totals.

Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., rejected the most government demands for user information in Argentina, where 68 percent of the requests were denied. Less than 50 percent of the government requests for user data were complied with in Canada, Chile, France, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey and South Korea.

I’m sure they have an office full of attorneys versed in the laws of various countries.

Another article.

Posted on October 26, 2011 at 5:54 AM • View Comments

Official Malware from the German Police

The Chaos Computer Club has disassembled and analyzed the Trojan used by the German police for legal intercept. In its default mode, it takes regular screenshots of the active window and sends it to the police. It encrypts data in AES Electronic Codebook mode with—are you ready?—a fixed key across all versions. There’s no authentication built in, so it’s easy to spoof. It sends data to a command-and-control server in the U.S., which is almost certainly against German law. There’s code to allow the controller to install additional software onto the target machine, but that’s not authenticated either, so it would be easy to fool the Trojan into installing anything.

Detailed analysis in German. F-Secure has announced it will treat the Trojan as malware. I hope all the other anti-virus companies will do the same.

EDITED TO ADD (10/12): Another story. And some good information on the malware. Germany’s Justice Minister is calling for an investigation.

Posted on October 13, 2011 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

The Effects of Social Media on Undercover Policing

Social networking sites make it very difficult, if not impossible, to have undercover police officers:

“The results found that 90 per cent of female officers were using social media compared with 81 per cent of males.”

The most popular site was Facebook, followed by Twitter. Forty seven per cent of those surveyed used social networking sites daily while another 24 per cent used them weekly. All respondents aged 26 years or younger had uploaded photos of themselves onto the internet.

“The thinking we had with this result means that the 16-year-olds of today who might become officers in the future have already been exposed.

“It’s too late [for them to take it down] because once it’s uploaded, it’s there forever.”

There’s another side to this issue as well. Social networking sites can help undercover officers with their backstory, by building a fictional history. Some of this might require help from the company that owns the social networking site, but that seems like a reasonable request by the police.

I am in the middle of reading Diego Gambetta’s book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. He talks about the lengthy vetting process organized crime uses to vet new members—often relying on people who knew the person since birth, or people who served time with him in jail—to protect against police informants. I agree that social networking sites can make undercover work even harder, but it’s gotten pretty hard even without that.

Posted on August 31, 2011 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

German Police Call Airport Full-Body Scanners Useless

I’m not surprised:

The weekly Welt am Sonntag, quoting a police report, said 35 percent of the 730,000 passengers checked by the scanners set off the alarm more than once despite being innocent.

The report said the machines were confused by several layers of clothing, boots, zip fasteners and even pleats, while in 10 percent of cases the passenger’s posture set them off.

The police called for the scanners to be made less sensitive to movements and certain types of clothing and the software to be improved. They also said the US manufacturer L3 Communications should make them work faster.

In the wake of the 10-month trial which began on September 27 last year, German federal police see no interest in carrying out any more tests with the scanners until new more effective models become available, Welt am Sonntag said.

However, this surprised me:

The European parliament backed on July 6 the deployment of body scanners at airports, but on condition that travellers have the right to refuse to walk through the controversial machines.

I was told in Amsterdam that there was no option. I either had to walk through the machines, or not fly.

Here’s a story about full-body scanners that are overly sensitive to sweaty armpits.

Posted on August 5, 2011 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Cryptography and Wiretapping

Matt Blaze analyzes the 2010 U.S. Wiretap Report.

In 2000, government policy finally reversed course, acknowledging that encryption needed to become a critical part of security in modern networks, something that deserved to be encouraged, even if it might occasionally cause some trouble for law enforcement wiretappers. And since that time the transparent use of cryptography by everyday people (and criminals) has, in fact, exploded. Crypto software and algorithms, once categorized for arms control purposes as a “munition” alongside rocket launchers and nuclear triggers, can now be openly discussed, improved and incorporated into products and services without the end user even knowing that it’s there. Virtually every cellular telephone call is today encrypted and effectively impervious to unauthorized over-the-air eavesdropping. Web transactions, for everything from commerce to social networking, are now routinely encrypted end-to-end. (A few applications, particularly email and wireline telephony, remain stubbornly unencrypted, but they are increasingly the exception rather than the rule.)

So, with this increasing proliferation of eavesdrop-thwarting encryption built in to our infrastructure, we might expect law enforcement wiretap rooms to have become quiet, lonely places.

But not so fast: the latest wiretap report identifies a total of just six (out of 3194) cases in which encryption was encountered, and that prevented recovery of evidence a grand total of … (drumroll) … zero times. Not once. Previous wiretap reports have indicated similarly minuscule numbers.

I second Matt’s recommendation of Susan Landau’s book: Surveillance or Security: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT Press, 2011). It’s an excellent discussion of the security and politics of wiretapping.

Posted on July 27, 2011 at 2:10 PM • View Comments

iPhone Iris Scanning Technology

No indication about how well it works:

The smartphone-based scanner, named Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, is made by BI2 Technologies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and can be deployed by officers out on the beat or back at the station.

An iris scan, which detects unique patterns in a person’s eyes, can reduce to seconds the time it takes to identify a suspect in custody. This technique also is significantly more accurate than results from other fingerprinting technology long in use by police, BI2 says.

When attached to an iPhone, MORIS can photograph a person’s face and run the image through software that hunts for a match in a BI2-managed database of U.S. criminal records. Each unit costs about $3,000.

[…]

Roughly 40 law enforcement units nationwide will soon be using the MORIS, including Arizona’s Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, as well as officers in Hampton City in Virginia and Calhoun County in Alabama.

Posted on July 26, 2011 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

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