Entries Tagged "police"

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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

Pupillometer

Does this EyeCheck device sound like anything other than snake oil:

The device looks like binoculars, and in seconds it scans an individuals pupils to detect a problem.

“They’ll be able to tell if they’re on drugs, and what kind, whether marijuana, cocaine, or alcohol. Or even in the case of a tractor trailer driver, is he too tired to drive his rig?” said Ohio County Sheriff Tom Burgoyne.

The device can also detect abnormalities from chemical and biological effects, as well as natural disasters.

Here’s the company. The device is called a pupillometer, and “uses patented technologies to deliver reliable pupil measurements in less than five minutes for the detection of drugs and fatigue.” And despite what the article implied, the device doesn’t do this at a distance.

I’m not impressed with the research, but this is not my area of expertise. Anyone?

Posted on September 18, 2006 at 1:39 PM • View Comments

Burglars Foil Alarm Systems

Clever trick:

Their scheme: Cut a closed store’s phone lines. Hang back while cops respond to the alarm. After officers fail to spot anything wrong and drive away, break into the store and spend as much time as they need to make off with a weekend’s worth of cash.

And one I wrote about in Beyond Fear (page 56):

Attackers commonly force active failures specifically to cause a larger system to fail. Burglars cut an alarm wire at a warehouse and then retreat a safe distance. The police arrive and find nothing, decide that it’s an active failure, and tell the warehouse owner to deal with it in the morning. Then, after the police leave, the burglars reappear and steal everything.

Posted on September 13, 2006 at 11:10 AM • View Comments

Behavioral Profiling Nabs Warren Jeffs

This is interesting:

A paper license tag, a salad and stories that didn’t make sense pricked the suspicions of a state trooper who stopped the car of a wanted fugitive polygamist in Las Vegas.

But it was the pumping carotid artery in the neck of Warren Steed Jeffs that convinced Nevada Highway Patrolman Eddie Dutchover that he had cornered someone big.

This is behavioral profiling done right, and it reminds me of the Diana Dean story. (Here’s another example of behavioral profiling done right, and here is an article by Malcolm Gladwell on profiling and generalizations.)

Behavioral profiling is tough to do well. It requires intelligent and well-trained officers. Done badly, it quickly defaults to racial profiling. But done well, it’ll do far more to keep us safe than object profiling (e.g., banning liquids on aircraft).

Posted on August 31, 2006 at 1:11 PM • View Comments

Random Bag Searches in Subways

Last year, New York City implemented a program of random bag searches in the subways. It was a silly idea, and I wrote about it then. Recently the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the program. Daniel Solove wrote about the ruling:

The 2nd Circuit panel concluded that the program was “reasonable” under the 4th Amendment’s special needs doctrine. Under the special needs doctrine, if there are exceptional circumstances that make the warrant and probable cause requirements unnecessary, then the search should be analyzed in terms of whether it is “reasonable.” Reasonableness is determined by balancing privacy against the government ‘s need. The problem with the 2nd Circuit decision is that under its reasoning, nearly any search, no matter how intrusive into privacy, would be justified. This is because of the way it assesses the government’s side of the balance. When the government’s interest is preventing the detonation of a bomb on a crowded subway, with the potential of mass casualties, it is hard for anything to survive when balanced against it.

The key to the analysis should be the extent to which the search program will effectively improve subway safety. In other words, the goals of the program may be quite laudable, but nobody questions the importance of subway safety. Its weight is so hefty that little can outweigh it. The important issue is whether the search program is a sufficiently effective way of achieving those goals that it is worth the trade-off in civil liberties. On this question, unfortunately, the 2nd Circuit punts. It defers to the law enforcement officials:

That decision is best left to those with “a unique understanding of, and responsibility for, limited public resources, including a finite number of police officers.” Accordingly, we ought not conduct a “searching examination of effectiveness.” Instead, we need only determine whether the Program is “a reasonably effective means of addressing” the government interest in deterring and detecting a terrorist attack on the subway system…

Instead, plaintiffs claim that the Program can have no meaningful deterrent effect because the NYPD employs too few checkpoints. In support of that claim, plaintiffs rely upon various statistical manipulations of the sealed checkpoint data.

We will not peruse, parse, or extrapolate four months’ worth of data in an attempt to divine how many checkpoints the City ought to deploy in the exercise of its day to day police power. Counter terrorism experts and politically accountable officials have undertaken the delicate and esoteric task of deciding how best to marshal their available resources in light of the conditions prevailing on any given day. We will not and may not second guess the minutiae of their considered decisions. (internal citations omitted)

Although courts should not take a “know it all” attitude, they must not defer on such a critical question. The problem with many security measures is that they are not a very wise expenditure of resources. It is costly to have a lot of police officers engage in these random searches when they could be doing other things or money could be spent on other measures. A very small number of random searches in a subway system of over 4 million riders a day seems more symbolic that effective. If courts don’t question the efficacy of security measures in the name of terrorism, then it allows law enforcement officials to win nearly all the time. The government just needs to come into court and say “terrorism” and little else will matter.

Posted on August 16, 2006 at 3:32 PM • View Comments

Dangers of Reporting a Computer Vulnerability

This essay makes the case that there no way to safely report a computer vulnerability.

The first reason is that whenever you do something “unnecessary,” such as reporting a vulnerability, police wonder why, and how you found out. Police also wonders if you found one vulnerability, could you have found more and not reported them? Who did you disclose that information to? Did you get into the web site, and do anything there that you shouldn’t have? It’s normal for the police to think that way. They have to. Unfortunately, it makes it very uninteresting to report any problems.

A typical difficulty encountered by vulnerability researchers is that administrators or programmers often deny that a problem is exploitable or is of any consequence, and request a proof. This got Eric McCarty in trouble—the proof is automatically a proof that you breached the law, and can be used to prosecute you! Thankfully, the administrators of the web site believed our report without trapping us by requesting a proof in the form of an exploit and fixed it in record time. We could have been in trouble if we had believed that a request for a proof was an authorization to perform penetration testing. I believe that I would have requested a signed authorization before doing it, but it is easy to imagine a well-meaning student being not as cautious (or I could have forgotten to request the written authorization, or they could have refused to provide it…). Because the vulnerability was fixed in record time, it also protected us from being accused of the subsequent break-in, which happened after the vulnerability was fixed, and therefore had to use some other means. If there had been an overlap in time, we could have become suspects.

Interesting essay, and interesting comments. And here’s an article on the essay.

Remember, full disclosure is the best tool we have to improve security. It’s an old argument, and I wrote about it way back in 2001. If people can’t report security vulnerabilities, then vendors won’t fix them.

EDITED TO ADD (5/26): Robert Lemos on “Ethics and the Eric McCarty Case.”

Posted on May 26, 2006 at 7:35 AM • View Comments

A Real Movie-Plot Threat

“Arson Squad Blows Up News Rack, Tom Cruise Movie to Blame”

A newspaper promotion for Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible III” movie was off to an explosive start when a California arson squad blew up a news rack, thinking it contained a bomb.

The confusion: the Los Angeles Times rack was fitted with a digital musical device designed to play the Mission: Impossible theme song when the door was opened. But in some cases, the red plastic boxes with protruding wires were jarred loose and dropped onto the stack of newspapers inside, alarming customers.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Posted on May 2, 2006 at 1:41 PM • View Comments

Social Engineering a Police Officer

Really nice social engineering example. Note his repeated efforts to ensure that if he’s stopped again, he can rely on the cop to vouch for him.

Smooth-talking escapee evades police

Woe is Carl Bordelon, a police officer for the town of Ball, La. His dashboard camera captured (below) his questioning of Richard Lee McNair, 47, on Wednesday. Earlier that same day, McNair had escaped from a federal penitentiary at nearby Pollock, La., reportedly hiding in a prison warehouse and sneaking out in a mail van. Bordelon, on the lookout, stopped McNair when he saw him running along some railroad tracks. What follows is a chillingly fascinating performance from McNair, who manages to remain fairly smooth and matter-of-fact while tripping up Bordelon. The officer notices that the guy matches the description of McNair—who was serving a life sentence for killing a trucker at a grain elevator in Minot, N.D., in 1987—observes that he looked like he’d “been through a briar patch” and had to wonder why he would choose appalling heat (at least according to that temperature gauge in the police car) to go running, without any identification, on a dubious 12-mile run. But he doesn’t notice when McNair changes his story—he gives two different names (listen for it)—and eventually, Bordelon bids him farewell, saying: “Be careful, buddy.” McNair remains on the loose. (Note: Video is more than eight minutes long but worth it.)

Posted on April 13, 2006 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.