Law Enforcement and Big Data
May 11, 2018
The job of being an officer of the law has never been harder, but many on the tech side are trying to make it easier. But, as with most innovations, this might make life harder. Confused? Join the club. A recent spate of big data law enforcement innovations are due to become a hot button issue for the foreseeable future. The latest one came from a recent Boing Boing piece, “Raleigh Cops are Investigating Crime by Getting Google to Reveal the Identity of Every Mobile User Within Acres of the Scene.”
According to the story:
“Public records requests have revealed that on at least four occasions, the Raleigh-Durham police obtained warrants forcing Google to reveal the identities of every mobile user within acres of a crime scene, sweeping up the personal information of thousands of people in a quest to locate a single perp.”
Such a double edged sword. On one hand we all want wrongdoers to be handled in a lawful way, but on the other this is all getting too close to science fiction. Couple that with the recent news that smart devices like Alexa are listening to every conversation and may some day be used as evidence in court.
In Stephen E Arnold’s “Making Sense of Chat” presentation for the Telestrategies ISS conference in Prague in June 2018, he will highlight three commercial systems which can process large flows of data. He said:
The efficiencies of the new systems means that needed information can be identified and displayed to an investigator. Smart software, not a team of analysts, scans digital information, identifies content with a probability of being germane to a case, and presenting that data in an easy-to-understand report. The result is that the hand waving about invasive analysis of information is often different from the actual functioning of a modern system. Today’s newest systems deliver benefits that were simply not possible with older, often manual methods.
He plans to offer webinars on the chat topic as well as his deanonymizing blockchain lecture. Watch for details in Beyond Search and in his weekly DarkCyber video.
Patrick Roland, May 11, 2018
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