PI Newswire

It’s not just for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars anymore. The Department of Homeland Security is interested in a camera package that can peek in on almost four square miles of (constitutionally protected) American territory for long, long stretches of time.

Homeland Security doesn’t have a particular system in mind. Right now, it’s just soliciting “industry feedback” on what a formal call for such a “Wide Area Surveillance System” might look like. But it’s the latest indication of how powerful military surveillance technology, developed to find foreign insurgents and terrorists, is migrating to the home front.

The Department of Homeland Security says it’s interested in a system that can see between five to 10 square kilometers — that’s between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — in its “persistent mode.” By “persistent,” it means the cameras should stare at the area in question for an unspecified number of hours to collect what the military likes to call “pattern of life” data — that is, what “normal” activity looks like for a given area. Persistence typically depends on how long the vehicle carrying the camera suite can stay aloft; DHS wants something that can fit into a manned P-3 Orion spy plane or a Predator drone — of which it has a couple. When not in “persistent mode,” the cameras ought to be able to see much, much further: “long linear areas, tens to hundreds of kilometers in extent, such as open, remote borders.”

If it’s starting to sound reminiscent of the spy tools the military has used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should. Homeland Security wants the video collected by the system to beam down in “near real time” — 12 seconds or quicker — to a “control room (T) or to a control room and beyond line of sight (BLOS) ruggedized mobile receiver on the ground,” just as military spy gear does. The camera should shift to infrared mode for nighttime snooping, and contain “automated, real time, motion detection capability that cues a spotter imager for target identification.” Tests for the system will take place in Nogales, Arizona.

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Please find the top 25 news stories, current events, professional opinion and insights aggregated by PI Newswire for the week ending January 22, 2012. As always there are many great articles ranging from the bizarre to educational with everything else in-between. We encourage you to comment and share your thoughts, opinions and experiences. Enjoy, have a wonderful week & stay safe!

Vote NO on HB 1006!! http://bit.ly/yJx5ic

Anonymous Goes on Megaupload Revenge Spree: DoJ, RIAA, MPAA, and Universal Music All
Offline http://bit.ly/xS7Rnx

Free Software Blocks Keyloggers by Encrypting Keystrokes http://bit.ly/xmZZ7y

Cops: Jailed man smuggled gun in rectum http://bit.ly/z626A9

Do Women Cheat As Much As Men Do? http://bit.ly/AlRlNB

Man wants a job with FBI, instead gets 80 months in jail for child pornography http://bit.ly/wHnSZd

Controversy – but no charges – for coroner, private investigator for soliciting 17 year old autistic boy http://bit.ly/xLbNIP

The ‘toys’ that let you spy on the neighbours – new ‘Wi-Spi’ helicopter and ‘Intruder’ car offer hi-tech surveillance http://bit.ly/zUPrfb

Hidden Camera Inside Houston Precinct 1 Sheds Light on Police Probe http://bit.ly/wkHIIt

Should You Be Able To Sue Your Spouse’s Lover? http://bit.ly/AuTJnb

Eight officers resign over illegal searches of dozens of people using police files http://bit.ly/yt33hq

65 Year Old Woman Gets on Plane With Handgun in Purse: Passengers Furious With TSA http://bit.ly/wcwjuj

Forensic Apps for First Responders http://bit.ly/zdHZQE

Process Server Serves Lawsuit on Lindsay Lohan for Helping Kill Osama Bin Laden http://bit.ly/yujVu7

Air bag DNA foils insurance scam http://bit.ly/xwecQR

‘Boot up the backside camp’: Training female bodyguards Chinese style http://bit.ly/A0JiQ3

Background checks encouraged for online dating http://bit.ly/A5BN2G

NSA constructs hardened Android with super-spook mobile OS, available to the world http://bit.ly/yRyVHn

JP Morgan Chase Process Server Unable to Serve OJ Simpson Foreclosure Papers http://bit.ly/x7mhjq

Pepsi Pays 3 Million: EEOC Finds Hiring Discrimination against African Americans with Background Check Policy http://bit.ly/A1xShi

Police, Private Investigator Unable to Locate Missing Saudi Chemical Engineering Student Studying in Canada http://bit.ly/zlNdlr

Sex, spies and Mounties: the poisoned culture of the RCMP’s `Special O’ surveillance squad http://bit.ly/xTvefn

Ashton Kutcher Foursquare hack witnessed by millions of Twitter users http://bit.ly/zvLN4O

Bail Bondman & ‘Beat Down Posse’ leader convicted of racketeering and more http://bit.ly/xkLh1S

Google Abandons Anonymous Accounts With New Signup Form http://bit.ly/wRTEbJ

I am a secret fan of the reality TV show Cheaters. The appeals on Twitter for a local version of the show that exposes unfaithful spouses has motivated me to confess. The hype has been prompted by the e.tv promo featuring a local woman being shown video footage of her boyfriend at a chisanyama with several women.

Things heat up when Don Juan kisses one of his companions, which causes his suspicious but surprised girlfriend almost to faint. It comes to a head when she starts removing her jewellery in preparation for the confrontation between herself and the cheaters.

What happens after that is left to our imaginations because, as it turns out, the promo is a marketing gimmick for the US version, which plays on Wednesday nights. The script for the skirmish is always the same, though: the hysterical, aggrieved party screams profanities and beats up the cheaters, who are in most cases much more mortified by the cameras and all the commotion than they are about being caught in a compromising position.

My fascination with Cheaters has always been with how far people will go to verify or dispel any suspicions they may have about their partner’s fidelity. Cheaters is the extreme route, and perhaps a guide for what not to do.

But is there a foolproof method to check fidelity? Since the promo was launched, I’ve heard many sad and hilarious tales of snooping partners. I’m not talking about stalkers and bunny-boilers but ordinary people you could be friends with, or are already friends with.

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The US Defense Department’s The National Security Agency (NSA) has released a security-hardened version of Google’s mobile OS, Android.

The spook-enhanced build of the operating system was released last week and is based on SELinux, also created by the National Security Agency. The inaugural release of the SE Android project focuses on limiting the scope for malicious or flawed apps to cause mischief, as explained in the project documentation:

Security Enhanced (SE) Android is a project to identify and address critical gaps in the security of Android. Initially, the SE Android project is enabling the use of SELinux in Android in order to limit the damage that can be done by flawed or malicious apps and in order to enforce separation guarantees between apps. However, the scope of the SE Android project is not limited to SELinux.
Links to SE Android source code and instructions on putting it together can be found on the project’s web page. The focus of the project is on damage limitation rather than prevention. The target audience of the project is clearly mobile developers, security experts or perhaps device manufacturers, and not regular Android smartphone users looking for a little extra privacy and security.

App support is low and if you don’t know what you are doing you might even end up with a bricked smartphone. The goals of the SE Android were first publicly outlined during a presentation [PDF] at last year’s Linux Security Summit.

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With attacks on data and IT infrastructure on the rise — along with the costs and potential business impact of attacks — security professionals are starting to express a sense of futility in their work.

This is especially so following the past couple of years, which have included high-profile and successful attacks on companies that would be expected to have the wherewithal to protect their infrastructure, including RSA Security, Google, NASDAQ Directors Desk, Symantec, and many others.

“There’s a sense that no matter what you do, what steps are taken, if someone wants to hack your systems, your data, they can,” says the security analyst at a midwest manufacturer. “It’s becoming insanely frustrating.”

The U.S. — in what some have argued is a move that both shows the importance of the IT infrastructure and the futility of traditional electronic defenses — last year stated that the government would use military force in retaliation against certain cyber attacks.

“Frustration in the industry has certainly been growing, so much that more on the defensive side have been wondering what could be done to more proactively combat attackers,” the analyst says.

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Everything you type on your PC, whether it’s a Web address, your credit card information, user names and passwords – everything – is fair game for key loggers, the hacker-jerks who want to steal your identity and make your life miserable.

Rather than wasting your time reading the rest of this column, hie thee to www.keyscrambler.com and download the free version of KeyScrambler for Windows PCs. If you’re impressed, fork over either $30 or $45 for more powerful versions.

KeyScrambler is simple to use. Once it’s installed, you don’t have to worry about it. As you type in a Web address, user name, password or any other sensitive bit of information, KeyScrambler encrypts it – you can actually watch it generate nonsense character in a little window at the top of your Web browser. I installed it on both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and in both cases, it worked just fine.

Those nonsense characters are all a hacker can see, and that won’t do him a bit of good. Your password, for example, comes out as c&b% (or some such combination).

Unlike some commercial programs that protect against the key logging programs they know about, KeyScrambler protects against any key-logging program because it encrypts everything that’s typed into a browser window or other sensitive fill-in-the-blanks

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In 2012, Ernst & Young’s Simon Placks will be writing for I4S on a monthly basis as we focus anew on the topic of IT security and threats in the digital arena. Here, Simon sets the scene.

In the UK, I often think that if you stand somewhere long enough you will eventually become part of a queue. Try it the next time you’re in a shopping centre. People, it would seem, believe that if you’re standing still when everybody else is running around then there simply must be a pretty good reason for it.

Standing still and not ‘moving with the times’ is generally discouraged in the security world. In the field of computer forensics, practitioners are in a continuous technological ‘arms race’ with wrongdoers while software and devices are constantly changing.

There’s a need to be able to find evidence on whatever technology is out there – including the latest gadgets, satellite navigation tools, tablets or cloud services.

Yet, at the same time, it can be surprising how hesitant practitioners feel as the discipline evolves. In the world of proof and evidence, tried-and-tested technologies and procedures are hard-earned and valued. Despite this discomfort, we’re now seeing the emergence of ‘a new forensics’: a discipline that’s reinventing itself year-by-year, but that remains rooted in stable scientific principles.

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Law Enforcement Training and Resource Group LLC., (www.letrg.com) has come out with a new suite of applications for all smart phones. The suite is built around the needs of the first responder’s response to services calls.

This suite is available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry smart phones and should be used with those phones with at least a 5 megapixel camera (for best results). The suite of more than a dozen different applications comes complete. The applications are divided into: tools, calculators, and evidence.

Tools include a caliper, level (in degrees and percentage of slope), audio officer notes, field contact report, DOA notes, and References files. The three calculators included are Skid Mark Calculator (for minimum speed, Yaw, and friction factor), pictorial blood spatter trajectory calculator, and a pictorial digital dimension calculator. The evidence applications include two for photos (pre-scaled and scaled photo sets), two apps for video (again one pre-scaled and one for scaled video) along with a field contact audio recorder.

After a simple two step setup, the suite is ready to use. All evidence files are encoded with metafiles that include: agency identifier, officer identifier, case number, GPS location of the scene, date, time, and picture/video/audio numbering.

Upon completion of the call the responder should download the case folders onto a computer with a DVD disk drive and then label the DVD with the case number for evidence, remembering to always follow agency SOPs.

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Remote-control specialists Interactive Toy Concepts will offer two new radio-controlled vehicles whose names leave little doubt as to their purpose – the ‘Wi-Spi’ and the ‘Intruder.’

Both are controlled via smartphone applications and deliver a live stream of video back to the user’s screen.

A company representative said that the Intruder was, ‘perfect if you want to spy on your colleague in the next cube,’ according to electronics site EETimes.

The smartphone app can also record videos and rapidly upload them to Twitter and Facebook.

The gadgets are due on the market in autumn 2012, priced at £80 for ‘Wi-Spi’ and £65 for the intruder.

Both are controlled via wi-fi – and thus will, at least have a limited range.

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At first glance, technology is making all our lives simpler. Dig a little deeper, and complications erupt. Constant communication brings unwanted stress. Some education experts deem excessive computer use by students addictive and damaging. And in the world of public safety, the idea of Big Brother is more than a literary reference.

The Supreme Court of the United States already has heard evidence on the use by police of global positioning system devices, but no decision has been made. As it stands, police can secretly attach such a device on a suspect’s vehicle, then sit back and track its every move. It has been effective, no doubt, but it should require more oversight.

Local police agencies want us to believe they only use the tactic in certain circumstances and only with probably cause that crime has been, or will be committed. It is not a case of them simply tossing a tracking device on a car on a whim. That should make us all feel better, but it doesn’t.

We don’t argue that the GPS tactic gives police a leg up on tricky investigations, but then so do phone taps. Remember those? When landline telephone communications were the most technologically advanced and convenient forms of real-time conver-sations? The Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that such “electronic eavesdropping without procedural safeguards” was illegal under the Fourth Amendment.

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Intelligence-led policing, an umbrella concept which includes “predictive policing,” could help move police departments beyond the increasingly outdated Community Policing model and toward a more-professional approach that envisions crime suppression and control as the most important result of good police work. The premise of “predictive policing” is that human behavior is predictable, which opens the door to computer-assisted techniques that can forecast subtle patterns of specified criminal activity.

Though at first blush it appears that intelligence-led policing and “predictive policing” are the same, they are, in fact, slightly different. According to David Sklansky of the University of California at Berkley, “[t]he main distinction between intelligence-led policing and predictive policing is that predictive policing claims to be more ambitious and more technologically sophisticated…” In other words, “predictive policing” may be more aggressive in its application of intelligence-led policing techniques, a distinction that may be more obvious in theory than practice.

Let’s also be clear at the outset. “Predictive policing” isn’t predictive. Using computer algorithms it estimates where certain types of crime may occur, in a similar way that meteorologists forecast weather or seismologists estimate earthquake aftershocks. No crystal balls, necromancy, witchcraft, prophecy, or freakish “precogs” — only inputs, outputs, and informed analysis of criminal patterns, not individual criminal behavior.

Database-Dependent Approach
This approach is likely more useful in large departments with multiple but unlinked databases that supervisors and administrators now use to track and report past criminal behavior and request future resources. Smaller departments lacking technological resources may find themselves using less sophisticated, manual techniques.

Using “predictive policing” models, supervisors can allocate current police resources in anticipation of criminal activity. In essence, it takes a large amount of data and, with proper analysis, transforms information into actionable intelligence.

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Capitalizing on one of the fastest-growing trends in law enforcement, a private California-based company has compiled a database bulging with more than 550 million license-plate records on both innocent and criminal drivers that can be searched by police.

The technology has raised alarms among civil libertarians, who say it threatens the privacy of drivers. It’s also evidence that 21st-century technology may be evolving too quickly for the courts and public opinion to keep up. The U.S. Supreme Court is only now addressing whether investigators can secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to cars without a warrant.

A ruling in that case has yet to be handed down, but a telling exchange occurred during oral arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts asked lawyers for the government if even he and other members of the court could feasibly be tracked by GPS without a warrant. Yes, came the answer.

Meanwhile, police around the country have been affixing high-tech scanners to the exterior of their patrol cars, snapping a picture of every passing license plate and automatically comparing them to databases of outstanding warrants, stolen cars and wanted bank robbers.

The units work by sounding an in-car alert if the scanner comes across a license plate of interest to police, whereas before, patrol officers generally needed some reason to take an interest in the vehicle, like a traffic violation.

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