Entries Tagged "police"

Page 19 of 28

Police Data Mining Done Right

It’s nice to find an example of the police using data mining correctly: not as security theater, but more as a business-intelligence tool:

When Munroe took over as chief two years ago, his department was drowning in crime and data. Police had a mass of data from 911 calls and crime reports; what they didn’t have was a way to connect the dots and see a pattern of behaviour.

Using some sophisticated software and hardware they started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.

Posted on August 10, 2007 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

More on Smell Samples

Earlier this month, I blogged about a library of people’s smells kept by the former East German police. Seems that the current German police is still doing it:

The Stasi secret police used scent gathering in Communist East Germany, collecting smells in empty jam jars and storing them. The method has reminded Germans of that failed regime of snoopers, and was highlighted in the recent Oscar-winning film “The Lives of Others” about a Stasi surveillance officer.

The domestic policy spokesman for the Social Democrat Party, Dieter Wiefelspütz, finds the new weapon “pretty bizarre.” But he knows that unappetising though it may be, the method has been employed by German investigators for a long time.

In legal terms, recording someone’s body odour is no different than taking their finger prints. It’s covered by the criminal statue book. The scent contains a person’s identity just like the lines of his finger tips or his DNA.

Taking someone’s DNA is subject to strict conditions but the law permits finger printing and scent recording whenever police deem it necessary as part of a criminal investigation—which means virtually always. Erhard Denninger, an expert on Germany’s justice system, has no problem with scent analysis. “It’s harmless by comparison with sledgehammer plans like searching people’s computers,” he said.

Suspects are told to hold several 10 centimeter steel pipes in succession for several minutes each.

There are strict rules governing this procedure. The interior minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has decreed that “persons must contaminate the metal tubes through their hands”, and that the aromatic traces thereby recorded “be secured in glass containers in dry condition.”

It sounds harmless. But a number of defence lawyers, Düsseldorf-based Udo Vetter among them, advise their clients not to agree to scent recording. If the state sniffs the sweat of its citizens, it amounts to a “considerable intrusion into one’s intimate sphere,” he says.

The complexity of collecting someone’s scent is the theme of Patrick Süskind’s novel “Perfume”, recently made into a movie, in which an 18th century murderer wraps beautiful women in cloths which he later boils. Unlike in real life, the perfume specialist chose to kill his victims before taking their scent.

Posted on August 1, 2007 at 2:05 PM • View Comments

Function Creep in London Congestion-Charge Cameras

In London (the system was built for road-fare collection, and is now being used for counterterrorism):

Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras—allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

I’ll bet you anything that, soon after this data is used for antiterrorism purposes, more exceptions will be put in place for more routine police matters.

EDITED TO ADD (8/16): Well, that didn’t take long.

Posted on July 18, 2007 at 11:40 AM • View Comments

Police Don't Overreact to Strange Object

It’s nice to post a positive story once in a while:

Is it a bird? Is it a bomb? No, it’s the missing ‘bot.

A robot dubbed Seahorse 1, which was stolen days before an international contest, has turned up in a field off Interstate 45 in Dallas.

“Somebody was mowing his grandmother’s yard and thought it was a bomb,” said Nathan Huntoon, an engineering grad student and member of SMU’s robotics team.

The police were delivering the missing machine to SMU Monday afternoon. “We don’t know yet if it’s in working condition,” Mr. Huntoon said.

Sad that this feels like an exception.

Posted on July 11, 2007 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

Story of the Greek Wiretapping Scandal

I’ve blogged a few times about the Greek wiretapping scandal. A system to allow the police to eavesdrop on conversations was abused (surprise, surprise).

Anyway, there’s a really good technical analysis in IEEE Spectrum this month.

On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy. [See sidebar “CEOs, MPs, & a PM.”]

The victims were customers of Athens-based Vodafone-Panafon, generally known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cellular service provider; Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company. A connection seemed obvious. Given the list of people and their positions at the time of the tapping, we can only imagine the sensitive political and diplomatic discussions, high-stakes business deals, or even marital indiscretions that may have been routinely overheard and, quite possibly, recorded.

[…]

A study of the Athens affair, surely the most bizarre and embarrassing scandal ever to engulf a major cellphone service provider, sheds considerable light on the measures networks can and should take to reduce their vulnerability to hackers and moles.

It’s also a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of one of the most elusive of cybercrimes. Major network penetrations of any kind are exceedingly uncommon. They are hard to pull off, and equally hard to investigate.

See also blog entries by Matt Blaze, Steve Bellovin, and John Markoff; they make some good security points.

EDITED TO ADD (10/22): More info:

The head of Vodafone Greece told the Government that as soon as it discovered the tapping software, it removed it and notified the authorities. However, the shutdown of the equipment prompted strong criticism of Vodafone because it had prevented the authorities from tracing the taps.

Posted on July 10, 2007 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

Surveillance Cameras that Obscure Faces

From Technology Review:

A camera developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, would obscure, with an oval, the faces of people who appear on surveillance videos. These so-called respectful cameras, which are still in the research phase, could be used for day-to-day surveillance applications and would allow for the privacy oval to be removed from a given set of footage in the event of an investigation.

An interesting privacy-enhancing technology.

Posted on June 26, 2007 at 7:41 AM • View Comments

4th Amendment Rights Extended to E-Mail

This is a great piece of news in the U.S. For the first time, e-mail has been granted the same constitutional protections as telephone calls and personal papers: the police need a warrant to get at it. Now it’s only a circuit court decision—the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio—it’s pretty narrowly defined based on the attributes of the e-mail system, and it has a good chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court…but it’s still great news.

The way to think of the warrant system is as a security device. The police still have the ability to get access to e-mail in order to investigate a crime. But in order to prevent abuse, they have to convince a neutral third party—a judge—that accessing someone’s e-mail is necessary to investigate that crime. That judge, at least in theory, protects our interests.

Clearly e-mail deserves the same protection as our other personal papers, but—like phone calls—it might take the courts decades to figure that out. But we’ll get there eventually.

Posted on June 25, 2007 at 4:13 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.