Security Specialist Pwns Police Cruiser

As a penetration tester Kevin Finisterre has hacked into everything from air-conditioning systems to some of the biggest banks in the world. But hacking into a police cruiser has to be one of his most unusual jobs. Hired by an unnamed municipal government, Kevin found that several IP addresses used by the city's police department would connect him into a Linux device carried in police cars. "Using little more than FTP and telnet commands, he then tapped into a digital video recorder used to record and stream audio and video captured from gear mounted on the vehicle's dashboard. He was shocked by the resulting live feed that eventually appeared on his computer screen."

Comments

OpenCop Project

[flyneye]

Frankly some specifics should be released about his hack.
There should be a GUI interface and we should ALL be able to watch through ANY cop camera ANY time. We pay for it. They better not have ANYTHING to hide.
Bullshit about criminals watching cops is moot. Too many to watch continuously.
We need MORE transparency. Then we don't have to worry about corruption quite as much.
WE will police the police.

Re:OpenCop Project

[Baron_Yam]

I like that, but I submit that it would be appropriate to have it be some kind of pay-per-view. Police cruisers don't have endless supplies of bandwidth, and what they do have costs money.

Most in-car video is DVR'd then downloaded upon return to the garage. You want live, you're going to do it over a secondary (and unnecessary) connection so as not to interfere with the police computers in the cars used for things like directing a cop to an incident and letting him know what he's getting into, as well as running various computer checks.

Also, there'd have to be some kind of system for a supervisor to shut down the live feed for some events - you don't need the bad guy getting a play-by-play of what the cops are doing to catch him.