Lifeboat Foundation

Rogue drones will be brought down by “detect and destroy” technology under plans for a new national counter-drone force to prevent Gatwick-style disruption, ministers have announced.

The new mobile special unit, to be set up by the Home Office, will be available to any police force or law enforcement agency in the UK to counter potential drone threats at major events or malicious attacks such as the chaos at Gatwick airport last Christmas.

The unit is expected to have military-grade cameras, radar and radio frequency scanners to detect rogue drones, similar to those deployed by the Army at Gatwick.

Hackers equipped with black market software are targeting cash machines with dated software and substandard security and walking away with millions over the course of a series of attacks, according to a collaborative investigation by Motherboard and German newsroom Bayerischer Rundfunk. Though law enforcement agencies are tightlipped about the trend, it’s a sign that banks may be surprisingly vulnerable to cybercrime.

Other sources, granted anonymity by Motherboard, described the same trend: “There are attacks happening, but a lot of the time it’s not publicized,” said one.

Plug-And-Play

Continue reading “This Malware Makes ATMs Spit Out All Their Money” »

Time for my yearly proselytizing for PBS UK’s Rough Science. Awesome educational show where a bunch of scientists are dumped on an island and have to work together to make something crazy out of local scavenged materials.

The group is taken to a disused prison on the island where they have to determine the longitude and latitude of the island, create a radio from a saucepan and create an insect repellent.

Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi have enabled, for the first time, determining whether the person behind a wall is the same individual who appears in given video footage, using only a pair of WiFi transceivers outside.

This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. Can a pair of WiFi transceivers outside the house determine if the person inside the house is the same as the one in the robbery video? Questions such as this have motivated this new technology.

Continue reading “Researchers’ new method enables identifying a person through walls from candidate video footage, using only WiFi” »

Under his plan, “Justice and Safety for All,” Bernie Sanders wants to ban facial recognition software for policing. As a supporter of Sanders, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. Here’s why…

Last Sunday, presidential-hopeful Bernie Sanders released on his website what is arguably one of the most extensive plans for law enforcement oversight and criminal justice overhaul that the United States has ever seen. As a progressive, myself, and supporter of Sanders during his primary run, I fully endorse everything that’s been laid out in this plan— that is, except for one minor policy.

The plan, titled “Justice and Safety for All,” calls to “Ban the use of facial recognition software for policing.” It also calls for a “moratorium on the use of the algorithmic risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system until an audit is completed,” whereby the audit would “ensure these tools do not have any implicit biases that lead to unjust or excessive sentences.”

Continue reading “Bernie Sanders Wants to Ban Facial Recognition for Policing, I Disagree” »

The F.B.I. should follow the example of European law enforcement and help victims of ransomware decrypt their data.

A water bottle recovered from a construction site where Tim DeSalvo – whose uncle Albert DeSalvo had confessed to being the internationally notorious Boston Strangler – gave police the DNA evidence they needed to bring closure to a case that has been a mystery for nearly 50 years, murders for which no one has ever been charged.

“This is really a story of relentlessness,’’ Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis explained today as Massachusetts top law enforcement officials revealed that DNA preserved from the body of the Boston Strangler’s last victim—raped and murdered in 1964—can now be linked with ”99.9 percent certainty” to the late Albert DeSalvo.

”This is good evidence. This is strong evidence. This is reliable evidence,’’ Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said of the new DNA result. ”But there can be no doubt.”

This article appears in Weekly Health Page July 31.

Researchers found that more than four out of five Ohio women who had been physically abused by their partners had suffered a head injury. A study that found domestic violence survivors had sustained staggering rates of head trauma and violent choking incidents suggests that many are left with ongoing health problems from “invisible injuries” to the brain.

But the effects of such injuries often go unrecognized by advocates, health care providers, law enforcement — even the victims themselves, researchers said.

“Over the past 50 years [America has] gone from institutionalizing people with mental illnesses, often in subhuman conditions, [in state mental health hospitals] to incarcerating them at unprecedented and appalling rates—putting recovery out of reach for millions of Americans […] On any given day, between 300,000 and 400,000 people with mental illnesses are incarcerated in jails and prisons across the United States, and more than 500,000 people with mental illnesses are under correctional control in the community.” [1] Mental Health America (MHA) supports effective, accessible mental health treatment for all people who need it who are confined in adult or juvenile correctional facilities or under correctional control. People with mental health and substance use conditions also need an effective classification system to protect vulnerable prisoners and preserve their human rights. [2] Notwithstanding their loss of their liberty, prisoners with mental health and substance use conditions retain all other rights, and these must be zealously defended.

Background

In the past decade, America has been locking up increasing numbers of individuals with mental health conditions. [3] MHA is both concerned by and opposed to the increasing use of criminal sanctions and incarceration, replacing the state mental hospitals with much more drastic curtailment of personal liberty and preclusion of community integration and community-based treatment. [4] Prisoners with mental health conditions are especially vulnerable to the difficult and sometimes deplorable conditions that prevail in jails, prisons, and other correctional facilities. Overcrowding often contributes to inadequacy of mental health services and to ineffective classification and separation of prisoner classes. It can both increase vulnerability and exacerbate mental illnesses. For these and other reasons, MHA supports maximum reasonable diversion. [5].