Tag Archive for: seized

NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers

/in

(credit: See-ming Lee)

The New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would “lead to system crashes.”

The system, the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), was built on top of SAP’s enterprise resource planning software platform and IBM’s DB2 database by Capgemini in 2012, and was used as a flagship case study by the company. PETS replaced the long-established paper-based evidence logging system used by the department, and was supposed to revolutionize evidence and property tracking. It was even submitted for the 2012 Computerworld Honors, an awards program honoring “those who use Information Technology to benefit society.”

Even with the system, however, the NYPD’s Assistant Deputy Commissioner Robert Messner told the New York City Council’s Public Safety Committee that the department had no idea how much money it took in as evidence, nor did it have a way of reporting how much was seized through civil forfeiture proceedings—where property and money is taken from people suspected of involvement in a crime through a civil filing, and the individuals whom it is seized from are put in the position of proving that the property was not involved in the crime of which they were accused.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Technology Lab – Ars Technica

How the FBI could use acid and lasers to access data stored on seized iPhone

/in

(credit: Amy)

A key justification for last week’s court order compelling Apple to provide software the FBI can use to crack an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters is that there’s no other way for government investigators to extract potentially crucial evidence from the device.

Technically speaking, there are ways for people to physically pry the data out of the seized iPhone, but the cost and expertise required and the failure rate are so great that the techniques aren’t practical.

In an article published Sunday, ABC News lays out two of the best-known techniques. The first one is known as decapping. It involves removing the phone’s memory chip and dissecting some of its innards so investigators can read data stored in its circuitry.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Technology Lab – Ars Technica

Many Tor-anonymized domains seized by police belonged to imposter sites

/in

A large number of the Tor-anonymized domains recently seized in a crackdown on illegal darknet services were clones or imposter sites, according to an analysis published Monday.

That conclusion is based on an indexing of .onion sites available through the Tor privacy service that cloaks the location where online services are hosted. Australia-based blogger Nik Cubrilovic said a Web crawl he performed on the darknet revealed just 276 seized addresses, many fewer than the 414 domains police claimed they confiscated last week. Of the 276 domains Cubrilovic identified, 153 pointed to clones, phishing, or scam sites impersonating one of the hidden services targeted by law enforcement, he said.

If corroborated by others, the findings may be viewed as good news for privacy advocates who look to Tor to help preserve their anonymity. Last week’s reports that law enforcement agencies tracked down more than 400 hidden services touched off speculation that police identified and were exploiting a vulnerability in Tor itself that allowed them to surreptitiously decloak hidden services. The revelation that many of the seized sites were imposters may help to tamp down such suspicions. Cubrilovic wrote:

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments


Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Law enforcement seized Tor nodes and may have run some of its own

/in

The FBI-ICE-Europol seizure page greeted users to Doxbin’s main .onion page. Doxbin wasn’t named in the Justice Department’s filings, and no explanation of the seizure has been given.

In a blog post written on November 9, Tor Project director Andrew Lewman went over the possible ways that over 400 hidden services on dozens of servers were located by law enforcement during Operation Onymous. While some of the servers were related to criminal activity (such as Silk Road 2.0), at least some of the servers were not—including several that were acting as infrastructure for Tor’s anonymizing network. And the only answer Lewman could currently offer as to how the sites were exposed was “We don’t know.”

That’s unnerving not just to people like the operators of the many illicit sites that were taken down by Operation Onymous, it’s also of concern to anyone using Tor to evade surveillance by more oppressive governments. Activists, dissidents, and journalists, for example, all rely on the same Tor infrastructure.

“If you are an activist or a journalist in these countries, your government thinks you are a criminal,” Eva Galperin, Global Policy Analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. “And you can learn a lot about good operational security practices by watching where criminals go wrong reading the affidavits on these cases, because your government is treating you as a criminal.”

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments


Ars Technica » Technology Lab