Entries Tagged "police"

Page 14 of 28

How Not to Carry Around Secret Documents

Here’s a tip: when walking around in public with secret government documents, put them in an envelope.

A huge MI5 and police counterterrorist operation against al-Qaeda suspects had to be brought forward at short notice last night after Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism chief accidentally revealed a briefing document.

[…]

The operation was nearly blown when Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick walked up Downing Street holding a document marked “secret” with highly sensitive operational details visible to photographers.

The document, carried under his arm, revealed how many terrorist suspects were to be arrested, in which cities across the North West. It revealed that armed members of the Greater Manchester Police would force entry into a number of homes. The operation’s secret code headed the list of action that was to take place.

Now the debate begins about whether he was just stupid, or very very stupid:

Opposition MPs criticised Mr Quick, with the Liberal Democrats describing him as “accident prone” and the Conservatives condemning his “very alarming” lapse of judgement.

But former Labour Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said it would be wrong for such an experienced officer to resign “for holding a piece of paper the wrong way”.

It wasn’t just a piece of paper. It was a secret piece of paper. (Here’s the best blow-up of the picture. And surely these people have procedures for transporting classified material. That’s what the mistake was: not following proper procedure.

He resigned.

Posted on April 10, 2009 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Police Powers and the UK Government in the 1980s

I found this great paragraph in this article on the future of privacy in the UK:

One of the few home secretaries who dominated his department rather than be cowed by it was Lord Whitelaw in the 1980s. He boasted how after any security lapse, the police would come to beg for new and draconian powers. He laughed and sent them packing, saying only a bunch of softies would erode British liberty to give themselves an easier job. He said they laughed in return and remarked that “it was worth a try”.

Posted on April 8, 2009 at 1:25 PM • View Comments

DNA False Positives

A story about a very expensive series of false positives. The German police spent years and millions of dollars tracking a mysterious killer whose DNA had been found at the scenes of six murders. Finally they realized they were tracking a worker at the factory that assembled the prepackaged swabs used for DNA testing.

This story could be used as justification for a massive DNA database. After all, if that factory worker had his or her DNA in the database, the police would have quickly realized what the problem was.

Posted on April 2, 2009 at 2:54 PM • View Comments

Man Arrested by Amtrak Police for Taking Photographs for Amtrak Photography Contest

You can’t make this stuff up. Even Stephen Colbert made fun of it.

This isn’t the first time Amtrak police have been idiots.

And in related news, in the U.K. it soon might be illegal to photograph the police.

EDITED TO ADD (2/10): The photographer’s page about the incident has been replaced with the words “No comment!” Anyone have a link to a copy? In the meantime, here’s an entry about the incident on a photo activist’s blog.

EDITED AGAIN: Thanks to Phil M. in comments for finding these Google Cache links from Duane Kerzic’s site:

Phil adds: “The main Amtrak page on his site has since been crawled, so Google now has the ‘no comment’ note cached.”

Posted on February 10, 2009 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device (SQUID)

New security device:

But what if an officer could lay down a road trap in seconds, then activate it from a nearby hiding place? What if—like sea monsters of ancient lore—the trap could reach up from below to ensnare anything from a MINI Cooper to a Ford Expedition? What if this trap were as small as a spare tire, as light as a tire jack, and cost under a grand?

Thanks to imaginative design and engineering funded by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), such a trap may be stopping brigands by 2010. It’s called the Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device, or SQUID. When closed, the current prototype resembles a cheese wheel full of holes. When open (deployed), it becomes a mass of tentacles entangling the axles. By stopping the axles instead of the wheels, SQUID may change how fleeing drivers are, quite literally, caught.

Of course, there’s a lot separating a cool idea from reality. But it is a cool idea.

Posted on January 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM • View Comments

The Exclusionary Rule and Security

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence gathered as a result of errors in a police database is admissible in court. Their narrow decision is wrong, and will only ensure that police databases remain error-filled in the future.

The specifics of the case are simple. A computer database said there was a felony arrest warrant pending for Bennie Herring when there actually wasn’t. When the police came to arrest him, they searched his home and found illegal drugs and a gun. The Supreme Court was asked to rule whether the police had the right to arrest him for possessing those items, even though there was no legal basis for the search and arrest in the first place.

What’s at issue here is the exclusionary rule, which basically says that unconstitutionally or illegally collected evidence is inadmissible in court. It might seem like a technicality, but excluding what is called “the fruit of the poisonous tree” is a security system designed to protect us all from police abuse.

We have a number of rules limiting what the police can do: rules governing arrest, search, interrogation, detention, prosecution, and so on. And one of the ways we ensure that the police follow these rules is by forbidding the police to receive any benefit from breaking them. In fact, we design the system so that the police actually harm their own interests by breaking them, because all evidence that stems from breaking the rules is inadmissible.

And that’s what the exclusionary rule does. If the police search your home without a warrant and find drugs, they can’t arrest you for possession. Since the police have better things to do than waste their time, they have an incentive to get a warrant.

The Herring case is more complicated, because the police thought they did have a warrant. The error was not a police error, but a database error. And, in fact, Judge Roberts wrote for the majority: “The exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence. The error in this case does not rise to that level.”

Unfortunately, Roberts is wrong. Government databases are filled with errors. People often can’t see data about themselves, and have no way to correct the errors if they do learn of any. And more and more databases are trying to exempt themselves from the Privacy Act of 1974, and specifically the provisions that require data accuracy. The legal argument for excluding this evidence was best made by an amicus curiae brief filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, but in short, the court should exclude the evidence because it’s the only way to ensure police database accuracy.

We are protected from becoming a police state by limits on police power and authority. This is not a trade-off we make lightly: we deliberately hamper law enforcement’s ability to do its job because we recognize that these limits make us safer. Without the exclusionary rule, your only remedy against an illegal search is to bring legal action against the police—and that can be very difficult. We, the people, would rather have you go free than motivate the police to ignore the rules that limit their power.

By not applying the exclusionary rule in the Herring case, the Supreme Court missed an important opportunity to motivate the police to purge errors from their databases. Constitutional lawyers have written many articles about this ruling, but the most interesting idea comes from George Washington University professor Daniel J. Solove, who proposes this compromise: “If a particular database has reasonable protections and deterrents against errors, then the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule should not apply. If not, then the exclusionary rule should apply. Such a rule would create an incentive for law enforcement officials to maintain accurate databases, to avoid all errors, and would ensure that there would be a penalty or consequence for errors.”

Increasingly, we are being judged by the trail of data we leave behind us. Increasingly, data accuracy is vital to our personal safety and security. And if errors made by police databases aren’t held to the same legal standard as errors made by policemen, then more and more innocent Americans will find themselves the victims of incorrect data.

This essay originally appeared on the Wall Street Journal website.

EDITED TO ADD (2/1): More on the assault on the exclusionary rule.

EDITED TO ADD (2/9): Here’s another recent court case involving the exclusionary rule, and a thoughtful analysis by Orin Kerr.

Posted on January 28, 2009 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

New Police Computer System Impeding Arrests

In Queensland, Australia, policemen are arresting fewer people because their new data-entry system is too annoying:

He said police were growing reluctant to make arrests following the latest phased roll-out of QPRIME, or Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange.

“They are reluctant to make arrests and they’re showing a lot more discretion in the arrests they make because QPRIME is so convoluted to navigate,” Mr Leavers said. He said minor street offences, some traffic offences and minor property matters were going unchallenged, but not serious offences.

However, Mr Leavers said there had been occasions where offenders were released rather than kept in custody because of the length of time it now took to prepare court summaries.

“There was an occasion where two people were arrested on multiple charges. It took six detectives more than six hours to enter the details into QPRIME,” he said. “It would have taken even longer to do the summary to go to court the next morning, so basically the suspects were released on bail, rather than kept in custody.”

He said jobs could now take up to seven hours to process because of the amount of data entry involved.

This is a good example of how non-security incentives affect security decisions.

Posted on January 22, 2009 at 1:51 PM • View Comments

Arming New York City Police with Machine Guns

I have mixed feelings about this:

The NYPD wants all 1,000 Police Academy recruits trained to use M4 automatic machine guns – which are now carried only by the 400 cops in its elite Emergency Service Unit – in time for the holiday celebration in Times Square.

On the one hand, deploying these weapons seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, training is almost never a bad thing.

Oh, and in case you were worried:

There is no intelligence Times Square will be a target on New Year’s Eve. The area will be on high alert, but has been so for every year since the millennium.

Posted on December 16, 2008 at 3:43 PM • View Comments

BNP Database Leaked

This is a big deal.

British National Party (BNP, a far-right nationalist party) membership and contacts list. 12,801 individuals are represented. Contains contact details and notes on selected party members and (possibly) other individuals. The list has been independently verified by Wikileaks staff as predominantly containing current or ex-BNP members, however other individuals who have donated to the BNP or who have had other contact (not necessarily supportive) with the BNP or one of its fronts may also be represented.

Says BBC:

Occupations ascribed to the listed names include teachers, a doctor, nurse, vicar and members of the armed forces.

While there is no ban on many of those professions joining the BNP, its right-wing political stance and whites-only membership policy are seen by many as incompatible with frontline public service.

Police officers, on the other hand, are formally banned from joining, a policy which is recognised in the list.

Alongside the name of a serving officer, the document states that there is “Discretion required re. employment concerns”.

Seems that the BNP database wasn’t hacked from the outside, but that someone on the inside leaked the list.

There’s a lot more leaked BNP documents on the Wikileaks website.

Posted on November 24, 2008 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

U.S. Court Rules that Hashing = Searching

Really interesting post by Orin Kerr on whether, by taking hash values of someone’s hard drive, the police conducted a “search”:

District Court Holds that Running Hash Values on Computer Is A Search: The case is United States v. Crist, 2008 WL 4682806 (M.D.Pa. October 22 2008) (Kane, C.J.). It’s a child pornography case involving a warrantless search that raises a very interesting and important question of first impression: Is running a hash a Fourth Amendment search? (For background on what a “hash” is and why it matters, see here).

First, the facts. Crist is behind on his rent payments, and his landlord starts to evict him by hiring Sell to remove Crist’s belongings and throw them away. Sell comes across Crist’s computer, and he hands over the computer to his friend Hipple who he knows is looking for a computer. Hipple starts to look through the files, and he comes across child pornography: Hipple freaks out and calls the police. The police then conduct a warrantless forensic examination of the computer:

In the forensic examination, Agent Buckwash used the following procedure. First, Agent Buckwash created an “MD5 hash value” of Crist’s hard drive. An MD5 hash value is a unique alphanumeric representation of the data, a sort of “fingerprint” or “digital DNA.” When creating the hash value, Agent Buckwash used a “software write protect” in order to ensure that “nothing can be written to that hard drive.” Supp. Tr. 88. Next, he ran a virus scan, during which he identified three relatively innocuous viruses. After that, he created an “image,” or exact copy, of all the data on Crist’s hard drive.

Agent Buckwash then opened up the image (not the actual hard drive) in a software program called EnCase, which is the principal tool in the analysis. He explained that EnCase does not access the hard drive in the traditional manner, i.e., through the computer’s operating system. Rather, EnCase “reads the hard drive itself.” Supp. Tr. 102. In other words, it reads every file-bit by bit, cluster by cluster-and creates a index of the files contained on the hard drive. EnCase can, therefore, bypass user-defined passwords, “break down complex file structures for examination,” and recover “deleted” files as long as those files have not been written over. Supp. Tr. 102-03.

Once in EnCase, Agent Buckwash ran a “hash value and signature analysis on all of the files on the hard drive.” Supp. Tr. 89. In doing so, he was able to “ingerprint” each file in the computer. Once he generated hash values of the files, he compared those hash values to the hash values of files that are known or suspected to contain child pornography. Agent Buckwash discovered five videos containing known child pornography. Attachment 5. He discovered 171 videos containing suspected child pornography.

One of the interesting questions here is whether the search that resulted was within the scope of Hipple’s private search; different courts have approached this question differently. But for now the most interesting question is whether running the hash was a Fourth Amendment search. The Court concluded that it was, and that the evidence of child pornography discovered had to be suppressed:

The Government argues that no search occurred in running the EnCase program because the agents “didn’t look at any files, they simply accessed the computer.” 2d Supp. Tr. 16. The Court rejects this view and finds that the “running of hash values” is a search protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Computers are composed of many compartments, among them a “hard drive,” which in turn is composed of many “platters,” or disks. To derive the hash values of Crist’s computer, the Government physically removed the hard drive from the computer, created a duplicate image of the hard drive without physically invading it, and applied the EnCase program to each compartment, disk, file, folder, and bit.2d Supp. Tr. 18-19. By subjecting the entire computer to a hash value analysis-every file, internet history, picture, and “buddy list” became available for Government review. Such examination constitutes a search.

I think this is generally a correct result: See my article Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531 (2005), for the details. Still, given the lack of analysis here it’s somewhat hard to know what to make of the decision. Which stage was the search—the creating the duplicate? The running of the hash? It’s not really clear. I don’t think it matters very much to this case, because the agent who got the positive hit on the hashes didn’t then get a warrant. Instead, he immediately switched over to the EnCase “gallery view” function to see the images, which seems to be to be undoudtedly a search. Still, it’s a really interesting question.

Posted on November 5, 2008 at 8:28 AM • View Comments

1 … 12 13 14 15 16 … 28

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.