Lifeboat Foundation

And that’s just one of the ways bad guys are putting drones to use, law enforcement officials say.

DENVER, Colorado — Last winter, on the outskirts of a large U.S. city, an FBI hostage rescue team set up an elevated observation post to assess an unfolding situation. Soon they heard the buzz of small drones — and then the tiny aircraft were all around them, swooping past in a series of “high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them,” the head of the agency’s operational technology law unit told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference here. Result: “We were then blind,” said Joe Mazel, meaning the group lost situational awareness of the target. “It definitely presented some challenges.”

The incident remains “law enforcement-sensitive,” Mazel said Wednesday, declining to say just where or when it took place. But it shows how criminal groups are using small drones for increasingly elaborate crimes.

Continue reading “A Criminal Gang Used a Drone Swarm To Obstruct an FBI Hostage Raid” »

There are a list of thousands of vehicles that have been tweaked for speed, riveting performance and exhilarating power that’s built and tested to be taken to extremes.

Due to the increasing number of millionaires and their treasured toys, this was definitely a wake up call for the police forces to step their game up and to put a counter measure leverage system into place by upgrading their state vehicles so that they aren’t easily intimidated or outrun by the reckless speedsters on the move. We are to take a look at 10 of the best Police Cars in the world.

Continue reading “Most Insane Police Vehicles In The World” »

General Atomics is working hard to put a close cousin of its Reaper anti-terrorism drone in the hands of local law enforcement.

A sting operation run by the Government Accountability Office revealed a number of loopholes that bad actors could use to buy excess military arms and equipment through the 1033 program.

When you realize you’ve somehow sold $1.2 million worth of controlled military equipment to a law enforcement agency that doesn’t exist, you’re likely to jumpstart efforts to reform that program.

That’s what happened when the Defense Logistics Agency learned that a sting operation run by the Government Accountability Office had exploited vulnerabilities in the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which sells local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies excess military equipment.

Continue reading “Pentagon Tightens Rules After Fake Cops Buy $1.2M in Weapons” »

WASHINGTON — Approximately a dozen police, fire and emergency agencies surrounding Washington, D.C. are using drones to capture criminal suspects and fight fires, but the unmanned aircraft systems also are sparking privacy concerns and legislation.

At least 347 state and local police, sheriff, fire and emergency units in the United States have acquired drones, according to an April report by Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.

“More and more departments in the public safety space, particularly in law enforcement, are acquiring drones for a range of operations,” says Dan Gettinger, co-director of the research group.

Continue reading “Drone usage by local police, fire departments quickly increasing” »

Artificial intelligence is already helping determine your future – whether it’s your Netflix viewing preferences, your suitability for a mortgage or your compatibility with a prospective employer. But can we agree, at least for now, that having an AI determine your guilt or innocence in a court of law is a step too far?

Worryingly, it seems this may already be happening. When American Chief Justice John Roberts recently attended an event, he was asked whether he could forsee a day “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision making”. He responded: “It’s a day that’s here and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things”.

Continue reading “AI sentencing criminals is a bad idea. This is why” »

Decentralization of technology and ever cheaper electronics and materials will also bring more risks. Not to mention the serious risks of terrorism.

Here is a less harmful example of what decentralized tech can do.

Using computers they’d built out of discarded electronics and hidden in a closet ceiling, two inmates in an Ohio prison hacked the facility’s network, downloaded porn, and applied for credit cards with stolen information, according to a report released Tuesday (April 11) by Ohio’s inspector general’s office.

Continue reading “Two Ohio inmates hacked their prison from the inside using makeshift computers built from spare parts” »

A new well written but not very favorable write-up on #transhumanism. Despite this, more and more publications are tackling describing the movement and its science. My work is featured a bit.

On the eve of the 20th century, an obscure Russian man who had refused to publish any of his works began to finalize his ideas about resurrecting the dead and living forever. A friend of Leo Tolstoy’s, this enigmatic Russian, whose name was Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, had grand ideas about not only how to reanimate the dead but about the ethics of doing so, as well as about the moral and religious consequences of living outside of Death’s shadow. He was animated by a utopian desire: to unite all of humanity and to create a biblical paradise on Earth, where we would live on, spurred on by love. He was an immortalist: one who desired to conquer death through scientific means.

Despite the religious zeal of his notions—which a number of later Christian philosophers unsurprisingly deemed blasphemy—Fyodorov’s ideas were underpinned by a faith in something material: the ability of humans to redevelop and redefine themselves through science, eventually becoming so powerfully modified that they would defeat death itself. Unfortunately for him, Fyodorov—who had worked as a librarian, then later in the archives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs—did not live to see his project enacted, as he died in 1903.

Continue reading “Transhumanism: More Nightmare Than Dream?” »

Everyone knows prevention is better than a cure, and that’s as true for law enforcement as it is for medicine. But there’s little evidence that a growing trend towards “predictive policing” is the answer, and it could even bake in racial bias.

Police departments faced with tight budgets are increasingly turning to machine learning-enabled software that can sift through crime data to help predict where crimes are likely to occur and who might commit them.

Using statistics in law enforcement is nothing new. A statistical system for tracking crime called Compstat was pioneered in New York in 1994 and quickly became popular elsewhere. Since then, crime has fallen 75 percent in New York, which has been credited by some to the technology. But while Compstat simply helped identify historical hotspots, “predictive policing” uses intelligent algorithms to forecast tomorrow’s hotspots and offenders.

Continue reading “Could Predictive Policing Lead to a Real-Life Minority Report?” »