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StingRay phone trackers are being used in the UK
Sky News has found evidence that StingRays -- those fake cell towers American cops are so fond of -- are in active use in the UK. The news organization ran software made by a German security company to scour for StingRays currently being used London and found 20 instances within just three weeks. Eric King of Privacy International told Sky News that this is the first time "it's been shown that they're being deployed in the UK," though the watchdog organization already knew that authorities have been relying on them for years. In fact, The Guardian reported back in 2011 that the London Metropolitan Police purchased "information and communications hardware" for surveillance as far back as 2008 and 2009. The Times confirmed their existence within the country, as well, just last year.
California senate wants warrants to be required for phone searches
The California State Senate has passed the "Leno bill," which aims to protect residents' digital privacy. Officially called Senate Bill 178, it would require authorities to secure a warrant whenever they want to search phones, laptops or other devices in California. That would effectively keep residents' text messages, emails, cloud storage, social media accounts and GPS data private unless a court issues a wiretap order, barring a few exceptions. The bill, authored by Sen. Mark Leno and Sen. Joel Anderson, has a solid list of supporters, including the EFF and major tech companies, such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter.
20,000 London police to wear body cams by early next year
The Mayor of London Boris Johnson has today announced plans to supply the majority of Metropolitan Police officers with roughly 20,000 body-worn cameras within the next ten months. Like other law enforcement agencies, particularly in the US, London police have been conducting a formal trial of the devices, said to be the biggest of its kind, for the past year. This body-cam beta test, which currently generates around 6,000 video clips each month, is due to complete this summer, but already the hardware has shown promise in on-the-fly evidence collection and improving trust where officer accountability is paramount, such as in stop-and-search scenarios.
Report: UK cops request citizen data every two minutes
According to Big Brother Watch (PDF), law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom have requested the personal metadata of citizens nearly three quarters of a million times in the past two years. That is, between 2012 and 2014, UK cops asked for identifying details pertaining to a text, email, phone call or search some 733,237 times. More than 90 percent of those requests were subsequently granted. That averages out to one fulfilled request every two minutes. Alarmingly, these metadata requests have only increased since 2012 with a whopping 250,000 of them coming last year alone. Even more worrisome, that BBW data originated from a series Freedom of Information Act demands and may under-represent the total number of requests actually made.
The Dark Web may be smaller, pervier than previously thought
Last week, two hackers unleashed an automated scanning tool on the the internet's deepest layers, known as the Dark Web. This digital underworld is accessible only through the Tor Network and trafficked largely by hackers and criminals looking to avoid the gaze of law enforcement. Hackers Alejandro Caceres and Amanda Towler set their website vulnerability scanning tool, PunkSPIDER, loose on the Dark Web in an effort to improve the semi-anonymizing network's security but made a surprising discovery: the Dark Web may not be nearly as large as experts estimate.
FBI slip-up leaves Megaupload, other seized sites hosting nasty ads
The FBI might want to continue brushing up on its internet skills. The agency's online division forgot to renew the web domain it uses to host seized websites, leading to a "black hat SEO" marketer taking over sites like Megaupload and temporarily filling them with malware- and scam-laden ads. Law enforcement officials eventually got their former domain suspended due to an "ongoing criminal investigation" into the malware, but the address' ultimate fate remains up in the air. Suffice it to say that the mistake is ironic -- the FBI inadvertently contributed to the very sort of digital crime it's trying to stop.
DOJ lays down some privacy rules for feds flying drones
The Justice Department promises to keep a closer eye on how its agencies are using drones from now on -- after all, they can be useful in nabbing suspects, but they can also be used as a tool to abuse power. In its new five-page policy guidance, the department has listed when its agencies can and can't use drones, with a focus on people's right to privacy. For instance, they can't be deployed to monitor activities protected by the First Amendment, such as peaceful protests. Authorities will also have to secure warrants to use the machines in places where the subject of investigation has "reasonable expectation of privacy." Obviously, the drones can only be used for authorized investigations and never for engaging in discriminatory acts.
Apple Watch support is coming to IBM's enterprise apps
For the past year or so, Apple and IBM have collaborated on the MobileFirst for iOS project, a series of 22 enterprise-specific apps for iOS. These apps are designed to help service professionals better perform their duties but for some, constantly fishing out a phone or tablet to access those apps actually hindered their efforts. That's why Apple announced through its website today that three of these apps -- Hospital RN, Field Connect and Incident Aware -- will now work on the Apple Watch.
White House launches the Police Data Initiative
Following the police-shooting death of Michael Brown and subsequent riots in Ferguson, MO, the Obama administration assembled a task force charged with somehow easing the adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry. The White House released those findings this morning and also announced that it is launching the Police Data Initiative, a 21-city pilot program designed to fast track solutions to the task force's suggestions.
Fingerprints will soon tell cops if suspects are on cocaine
A research team from the University of Surrey in the UK has reportedly developed a new, noninvasive drug test for cocaine that accurately detects its presence in your system through your fingerprints. Specifically, it looks for two common cocaine metabolites: benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine. These can be found in blood, sweat, and urine using a mass spectrometry technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation (DESI). And since the metabolites dissipate from our sweat more quickly than in urine or blood (in which it can persist for up to a week), law enforcement will one day be able tell if a suspect is currently high as opposed to having been high a few nights before. What's more, "we can distinguish between cocaine having been touched," Melanie Bailey, the study's lead author, told Motherboard, "and cocaine having been ingested." Plus since the sweat sample is tied to your fingerprint, it'll be nearly impossible for someone to swap it out for a clean batch.
Washington state police now need warrants to spy on cellphones
The US government might have only started taking a serious look at the civil liberty implications for stingrays and other cellphone surveillance devices, but Washington state isn't willing to wait. Governor Jay Inslee has just signed a bill into law requiring that police obtain warrants before using stingrays to simulate cell sites and intercept communications. They have to explicitly state their intention to use these gadgets (the FBI sometimes encourages departments to keep stingray use a secret), and they must toss out any information from people who aren't targets in a given investigation.
Hillary Clinton wants all police to wear body cameras
Police body cameras might just represent a big talking point in next year's US elections. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tells those at a policy forum that she wants "every department" to issue the wearables to their officers. While a White House taskforce has already recommended the technology, Clinton believes that the implementations should "go even further" in certain circumstances. As she argues, there's a pattern of cops abusing their power across the country -- body cameras should encourage accountability and transparency.
Police can spot differences between identical twins by melting DNA
Believe it or not, police have a real problem with identifying suspects who are identical twins -- unless you're willing to spend a month sequencing genes, DNA samples are all but useless. They may be far more effective in the future, though, as British researchers have developed a technique that melts DNA to identify what few differences exist. The team has determined that heating genes will break hydrogen bonds that form due to a person's environment and habits. Unless the twins live eerily similar lives, those bonds will snap at different temperature points and quickly identify who's who.
Cops gave a malware-laden drive to a lawyer for whistleblowers
Arkansas' Fort Smith Police Department may be responsible for some particularly sinister digital tricks, if you ask one lawyer. An attorney representing whistleblowers in a police corruption scandal says that the Department sent him a hard drive laden with trojans when he requested documents. Given that the rogue files were found in a folder specific to the court order (that is, they were added after the court order was issued), it looks as if someone in the FSPD wanted to hijack the lawyer's computer and sabotage his case. And that's not the only suspicious behavior, either -- the city reportedly deleted email accounts and messages that it knew it was supposed to keep.
Cops are routinely using this secret cell phone tracking tool
Big federal agencies with ominous-sounding three-letter acronyms aren't the only ones that spy on your activities -- your local police might be doing it, too. Take for instance, the police department of Erie County, New York, which was recently caught using stingray devices in at least 47 instances between May 1, 2010 and October 3, 2014. According to the details published by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the department asked the court for permission to use stingray only once between that time frame. The cops didn't even ask for a warrant; they only asked for a court order and described stingrays as "pen registers," which is only partially accurate.
The DEA collected call metadata way before the NSA did
Apparently, the NSA's massive surveillance program wasn't a first: it was modeled after a precursor that ran from 1992 until 2013. According to USA Today, that program was called USTO, because it monitored almost every American's calls from the US to other countries. It was a joint initiative by the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which began as a way to keep tabs on Colombian drug cartels and their supply routes. Since then, it grew in scope (thanks in part to a powerful computer provided by the Pentagon) to cover all international calls made to around 116 countries worldwide, including Canada, Mexico, parts of Asia and Europe, and most of Central and Southern America. The group was only dissolved after Edward Snowden went public with the NSA's secrets in 2013.
Police stations are becoming common Craigslist meetup locations
A good rule of thumb when meeting strangers off of Craigslist is to meet in public places. But you know what's safer than that when your gut's telling you to be extra careful? Meeting in police station lobbies. The Seattle Police Department is encouraging people to use its station lobbies as meetup, pickup or drop off points for Craigslist deals. Clean, legal ones only, of course. It's not the first state to offer its law enforcement HQs as a safe place to meet, though: this is a growing trend across the US started by the Chicago police. Aside from Seattle, Beaufort, Boca Raton, Columbia, South Carolina, Missouri and Virginia Beach have also followed Chicago's lead. Police stations, by the way, are open 24/7. So you can snap up even good deals posted at night without having to worry about getting kidnapped, raped or murdered. [Image credit: Wikimedia]
Federal law enforcement is wasting a lot of money on drones
The US' national law enforcement has been using drones to help nab crooks for almost nine years, but it's still making plenty of rookie mistakes. The Department of Justice's Inspector General has published an audit that shows its agencies not only making poor uses of drones, but wasting a ton of money in the process. Units in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives spent $600,000 on drones that didn't live up to their promised abilities or couldn't even fly in the first place; in one case, a unit blew $15,000 without telling headquarters. Meanwhile, only half of the FBI's 34 drones (which cost a total of $3 million) worked as of 2014, and the agency has just two pilots that have to fly across the country to deploy their unmanned machines. It's no wonder that investigators have used drones a mere 13 times since 2006, then -- it's rarely practical to even consider the idea.
Twitter makes it easier to report threats to the police
While Twitter has already simplified reporting abusive tweets, that's not enough if you're facing a very serious threat -- you want something that the police can use to get an arrest or restraining order. Thankfully, Twitter has delivered something that might help. A new email option lets you send yourself a copy of a threat report that you can take to law enforcement. While it only provides a basic summary of what happened, it both serves as an official record and helps officers understand what to do if they need private account information to make a bust.
California court says cops need warrants to get phone location data
A number of states already have laws preventing the police from snooping on your phone's location history without a warrant, but they just got another big boost from a court ruling. A California-based federal judge has determined that cops need those warrants because you have a reasonable expectation that your position data will remain private, even if it's vague info like the whereabouts of cell towers you've used. Cellphones can follow you anywhere and transmit a lot of information, the judge says. That location data may reveal much more about your life than you'd willingly share, especially at home and other private places where you have plenty of constitutional protections.
