London Bombing and the Usefulness of Terrorist Watch Lists
According to the London Times:
Security sources confirmed that none of the bombers was on any MI5 file, although one had links to a person investigated by police.
Entries Tagged "police"
Page 27 of 28
Stealing WiFi Access
Police have arrested a man for using someone else’s wireless Internet network in one of the first criminal cases involving this fairly common practice.
Near as I can tell, there was no other criminal activity involved. The man who used someone else’s wireless wasn’t doing anything wrong it it; he was just using the Internet.
Security Risks of Street Photography
Interesting article on the particular art form of street photography. One ominous paragraph:
More onerous are post-9/11 restrictions that have placed limits on photographing in public settings. Tucker has received e-mails from professionals detained by authorities for photographing bridges and elevated trains. “There are places where photographing people on the street may become illegal,” observes Westerbeck.
Sad.
Your ISP May Be Spying on You
From News.com:
The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers’ online activities.
Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs—that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.
I think the big idea here is that the Internet makes a massive surveillance society so easy. And data storage will only get cheaper.
DNA Identification
Here’s an interesting application of DNA identification. Instead of searching for your DNA at the crime scene, they search for the crime-scene DNA on you.
The system, called Sentry, works by fitting a box containing a powder spray above a doorway which, once primed, goes into alert mode if the door is opened.
It then sprays the powder when there is movement in the doorway again.
The aim is to catch a burglar in the act as stolen items are being removed.
The intruder is covered in the bright red powder, which glows under ultraviolet (UV) light and can only be removed with heavy scrubbing.
However, the harmless synthetic DNA contained in the powder sinks into the skin and takes several days, depending on the person’s metabolism, to work its way out.
Speeding Ticket Avoidance
This is a very popular security-related field, and one that every driver is at least somewhat interested in.
This site is run by an ex-policeman, and feels authoritative. He places a lot of emphasis on education; installing a fancy radar detector isn’t doing to do much for you unless you know how to use it correctly.
Here’s a product that seems to counter the threat of aerial license-plate scanners.
This spray claims to make your license plate invisible to cameras. I have no idea if it works.
One final note: the ex-cop is offering a $5,000 reward for the first person who can point him to a passive laser jammer that works.
State-Sponsored Identity Theft
In an Ohio sting operation at a strip bar, a 22-year-old student intern with the United States Marshals Service was given a fake identity so she could work undercover at the club. But instead of giving her a fabricated identity, the police gave her the identity of another woman living in another Ohio city. And they didn’t tell the other woman.
Oddly enough, this is legal. According to Ohio’s identity theft law, the police are allowed to do it. More specifically, the crime cannot be prosecuted if:
The person or entity using the personal identifying information is a law enforcement agency, authorized fraud personnel, or a representative of or attorney for a law enforcement agency or authorized fraud personnel and is using the personal identifying information in a bona fide investigation, an information security evaluation, a pretext calling evaluation, or a similar matter.
I have to admit that I’m stunned. I naively assumed that the police would have a list of Social Security numbers that would never be given to real people, numbers that could be used for purposes such as this. Or at least that they would use identities of people from other parts of the country after asking for permission. (I’m sure people would volunteer to help out the police.) It never occurred to me that they would steal the identity of random citizens. What could they be thinking?
License-Plate Scanning by Helicopter
From TheNewspaper.com:
The fictional police spy helicopter from the movie Blue Thunder is taking a big step toward becoming a reality. Police in the UK have successfully tested a 160 MPH helicopter that can read license plates from as much as 2,000 feet in the air. The Eurocopter EC135 is equipped with a camera capable of scanning 5 cars every second. Essex Police Inspector Paul Moor told the Daily Star newspaper: “This is all about denying criminals the use of the road. Using a number plate recognition camera from the air means crooks will have nowhere to hide.”
The use of Automated Plate Number Recognition (ANPR) is growing. ANPR devices photograph vehicles and then use optical character recognition to extract license plate numbers and match them with any selected databases. The devices use infrared sensors to avoid the need for a flash and to operate in all weather conditions.
This is an example of wholesale surveillance, and something I’ve written about before.
Of course, once the system is in place it will be used for privacy violations that we can’t even conceive of.
One of the companies that sells the camera scanning equipment touts it’s potential for marketing applications. “Once the number plate has been successfully ‘captured’ applications for it’s use are limited only by imagination and almost anything is possible,” Westminister International says on its website. UK police also envision a national database that holds time and location data on every vehicle scanned. “This data warehouse would also hold ANPR reads and hits as a further source of vehicle intelligence, providing great benefits to major crime and terrorism enquiries,” a Home Office proposal explains.
The only way to maintain security is not to field this sort of system in the first place.
Police Foil Bank Electronic Theft
From the BBC:
Police in London say they have foiled one of the biggest attempted bank thefts in Britain.
The plan was to steal £220m ($423m) from the London offices of the Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui.
Computer experts are believed to have tried to transfer the money electronically after hacking into the bank’s systems.
Not a lot of detail here, but it seems that the thieves got in using a keyboard recorder. It’s the simple attacks that you have to worry about….
Nuclear Terrorism False Positives
From the AP:
A man who recently had received radiation treatment for a medical condition set off a nuclear alert detector on a fire engine, prompting police to close down a roadway in Escondido while authorities searched for a nuclear weapon.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.