Entries Tagged "police"

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On the "War on Terror" Rhetoric

Echoing what I said in my previous post, Sir Ken Macdonald—the UK’s “director of public prosecutions”—has spoken out against the “war on terror”:

He said: “London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.

“The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.”

Sir Ken, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, told members of the Criminal Bar Association it should be an article of faith that crimes of terrorism are dealt with by criminal justice and that a “culture of legislative restraint in the area of terrorist crime is central to the existence of an efficient and human rights compatible process”.

He said: “We wouldn’t get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions. On the contrary, it is obvious that the process of winning convictions ought to be in keeping with a consensual rule of law and not detached from it. Otherwise we sacrifice fundamental values critical to the maintenance of the rule of law – upon which everything else depends.”

Exactly. This is not a job for the military, it’s a job for the police.

Posted on January 26, 2007 at 6:56 AM • View Comments

SAS Troops Stationed in London

British special forces are now stationed in London:

An SAS unit is now for the first time permanently based in London on 24-hour standby for counter-terrorist operations, The Times has learnt.

The basing of a unit from the elite special forces regiment “in the metropolitan area” is intended to provide the police with a combat-proven ability to deal with armed terrorists in the capital.

The small unit also includes surveillance specialists and bomb-disposal experts.

Although the Metropolitan Police has its own substantial firearms capability, the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who was mistakenly identified as a terrorist bomber on the run, has underlined the need to have military expertise on tap.

While I agree that the British police completely screwed up the Menezes shooting, I’m not at all convinced the SAS can do better. The police are trained to work within a lawful society; military units are primarily trained for military combat operations. Which group do you think will be more restrained?

This kind of thing is a result of the “war on terror” rhetoric. We don’t need military operations, we need police protection.

I think people have been watching too many seasons of 24.

Posted on January 25, 2007 at 3:34 PM • View Comments

Wholesale Surveillance

I had an op-ed published in the Arizona Star today:

Technology is fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance. Years ago, surveillance meant trench-coated detectives following people down streets. It was laborious and expensive and was used only when there was reasonable suspicion of a crime. Modern surveillance is the policeman with a license-plate scanner, or even a remote license-plate scanner mounted on a traffic light and a policeman sitting at a computer in the station.

It’s the same, but it’s completely different. It’s wholesale surveillance. And it disrupts the balance between the powers of the police and the rights of the people.

The news hook I used was this article, about the police testing a vehicle-mounted automatic license plate scanner. Unfortunately, I got the police department wrong. It’s the Arizona State Police, not the Tucson Police.

Posted on January 11, 2007 at 1:00 PM • View Comments

More on the Unabomber's Code

Last month I posted about Ted Kaczynski’s pencil-and-paper cryptography. It seems that he invented his own cipher, which the police couldn’t crack until they found a description of the code amongst his personal papers.

The link I found was from KPIX, a CBS affiliate in the San Francisco area. Some time after writing it, I was contacted by the station and asked to comment on some other pieces of the Unabomber’s cryptography for a future story (video online).

There were five new pages of Unabomber evidence that I talked about (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). All five pages were presented to me as being pages written by the Unabomber, but it seems pretty obvious to me that pages 4 and 5, rather than being Kaczynski’s own key, are notes written by a cryptanalyst trying to break the Unabomber’s code.

In any case, it’s all fascinating.

Posted on January 3, 2007 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

OneDOJ

Yet another massive U.S. government database—OneDOJ:

The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as “OneDOJ,” already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

The database is billed by its supporters as a much-needed step toward better information-sharing with local law enforcement agencies, which have long complained about a lack of cooperation from the federal government.

But civil-liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes.

The little-noticed program has been coming together over the past year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas, officials said. About 150 separate police agencies have access, officials said.

But in a memorandum sent last week to the FBI, U.S. attorneys and other senior Justice officials, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced that the program will be expanded immediately to 15 additional regions and that federal authorities will “accelerate . . . efforts to share information from both open and closed cases.”

Eventually, the department hopes, the database will be a central mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with local and state investigators, who now run checks individually, and often manually, with Justice’s five main law enforcement agencies: the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Within three years, officials said, about 750 law enforcement agencies nationwide will have access.

Computerizing this stuff is a good idea, but any new systems need privacy safeguards built-in. We need to ensure that:

  • Inaccurate data can be corrected.
  • Data is deleted when it is no longer needed, especially investigative data on people who have turned out to be innocent.
  • Protections are in place to prevent abuse of the data, both by people in their official capacity and people acting unofficially or fraudulently.

ln our rush to computerize these records, we’re ignoring these safeguards and building systems that will make us all less secure.

Posted on January 2, 2007 at 11:55 AM • View Comments

UK Car Rentals to Require Fingerprints

Welcome to a surveillance society:

If you want to hire a car at Stansted Airport, you now need to give a fingerprint.

The scheme being tested by Essex police and car hire firms, is not voluntary. Every car rental customer must take part.

No fingerprint, no car hire at Stansted airport.

These are stored by the hire firms—and will be handed over to the police if the car is stolen or used for another crime.

This is the most amusing bit:

“It’s not intrusive really. It’s different—and people need to adjust to it. It’s not Big Brother, it’s about protecting people’s identities. The police will never see these thumbprints unless a crime is committed.”

What are the odds that no crime will ever be committed?

Fingerprints are becoming more common in the UK:

But regardless of any ideological arguments, the use of biometric technology—where someone is identified by a physical characteristic—is already entering the mainstream.

Biometric UK passports were introduced this year, using facial mapping information stored on a microchip, and more than a million have already been issued.

A shop in the Bluewater centre in Kent has used a fingerprint checking scheme to tackle credit card fraud. And in Yeovil, Somerset, fingerprinting has been used to cut town-centre violence, with scanners helping pick out troublemakers.

It’s not just about crime. Biometric recognition is also being pitched as more convenient for shoppers.

Pay By Touch allows customers to settle their supermarket bill with a fingerprint rather than a credit card. With three million customers in the United States, this payment system is now being tested in the UK, in three Co-op supermarkets in Oxfordshire.

Posted on November 14, 2006 at 7:37 AM • View Comments

Swiss Police to Use Trojans for VoIP Tapping

At least they’re thinking about it:

Swiss authorities are investigating the possibility of tapping VoIP calls, which could involve commandeering ISPs to install Trojan code on target computers.

VoIP calls through software services such as Skype are encrypted as they are passed over the public Internet, in order to safeguard the privacy of the callers.

This presents a problem for anyone wanting to listen in, as they are faced with trying to decrypt the packets by brute force—not easy during a three-minute phone call. What’s more, many VoIP services are not based in Switzerland, so the authorities don’t have the jurisdiction to force them to hand over the decryption keys or offer access to calls made through these services.

The only alternative is to find a means of listening in at a point before the data is encrypted.

[…]

In order to install the application on the target computer, the Swiss authorities
envisage two strategies: either have law enforcement surreptitiously install it locally, or have the telco or ISP which provides Internet access to that computer install it remotely.

The application, essentially a piece of Trojan code, is also able to turn on the microphone on the target PC and monitor not just VoIP conversations, but also any other ambient audio.

Posted on October 18, 2006 at 2:26 PM • View Comments

Please Stop My Car

Residents of Prescott Valley are being invited to register their car if they don’t drive in the middle of the night. Police will then stop those cars if they are on the road at that time, under the assumption that they’re stolen.

The Watch Your Car decal program is a voluntary program whereby vehicle owners enroll their vehicles with the AATA. The vehicle is then entered into a special database, developed and maintained by the AATA, which is directly linked to the Motor Vehicle Division (MVD).

Participants then display the Watch Your Car decals in the front and rear windows of their vehicle. By displaying the decals, vehicle owners convey to law enforcement officials that their vehicle is not usually in use between the hours of 1:00 AM and 5:00 AM, when the majority of thefts occur.

If a police officer witnesses the vehicle in operation between these hours, they have the authority to pull it over and question the driver. With access to the MVD database, the officer will be able to determine if the vehicle has been stolen, or not. The program also allows law enforcement officials to notify the vehicle’s owner immediately upon determination that it is being illegally operated.

This program is entirely optional, but there’s a serious externality. If the police spend time chasing false alarms, they’re not available for other police business. If the town charged car owners a fine for each false alarm, I would have no problems with this program. It doesn’t have to be a large fine, but it has to be enough to offset the cost to the town. It’s no different than police departments charging homeowners for false burglar alarms, when the alarm systems are automatically hooked into the police stations.

Posted on October 16, 2006 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

New Harder-to-Counterfeit Iraqi Police Uniforms

In an effort to deal with the problem of imposters in fake uniforms, Iraqi policemen now have a new uniform:

Police Colonel Abdul-Munim Jassim explained why the new uniform would be difficult for criminals to fake.

“The Americans take a photo of the policeman together with the number of the uniform. If found elsewhere, it will immediately be recognised as stolen,” he said.

Bolani promised tough measures against anyone caught counterfeiting or trading in the uniforms and praised his officers, telling them their work had begun to turn back the tide of violence around Iraq.

I’m sure these things help, but I don’t see what kind of difference it will make to a normal citizen faced with someone in a police uniform breaking down his door at night. Or when gunmen dressed in police uniforms execute the brother of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.

Posted on October 11, 2006 at 12:28 PM • View Comments

This Is What Vigilantism Looks Like

Another airplane passenger false alarm:

Seth Stein is used to jetting around the world to create stylish holiday homes for wealthy clients. This means the hip architect is familiar with the irritations of heightened airline security post-9/11. But not even he could have imagined being mistaken for an Islamist terrorist and physically pinned to his seat while aboard an American Airlines flight—especially as he has Jewish origins.

Turns out that one of the other passengers decided to take matters into his own hands.

In Mr Stein’s case, he was pounced on as the crew and other travellers looked on. The drama unfolded less than an hour into the flight. As he settled down with a book and a ginger ale, the father-of-three was grabbed from behind and held in a head-lock.

“This guy just told me his name was Michael Wilk, that he was with the New York Police Department, that I’d been acting suspiciously and should stay calm. I could barely find my voice and couldn’t believe it was happening,” said Mr Stein.

“He went into my pocket and took out my passport and my iPod. All the other passengers were looking concerned.” Eventually, cabin crew explained that the captain had run a security check on Mr Stein after being alerted by the policeman and that this had cleared him. The passenger had been asked to go back to his seat before he had restrained Mr Stein. When the plane arrived in New York, Mr Stein was met by apologetic police officers who offered to fast-track him out of the airport.

Even stranger:

In a twist to the story, Mr Stein has since discovered that there is only one Michael Wilk on the NYPD’s official register of officers, but the man retired 25 years ago. Officials have told the architect that his assailant may work for another law enforcement agency but have refused to say which one.

I’ve written about this kind of thing before.

EDITED TO ADD (10/3): Here’s a man booted off a plane for speaking Tamil into his cellphone.

Posted on October 3, 2006 at 12:42 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.