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Police Using Dogs To Sniff Out Computer Memory
First time accepted submitter FriendlySolipsist points out a story about Rhode Island Police using a dog to find hidden hard drives. The recent arrival of golden Labrador Thoreau makes Rhode Island the second state in the nation to have a police dog trained to sniff out hard drives, thumb drives and other technological gadgets that could contain child pornography. Thoreau received 22 weeks of training in how to detect devices in exchange for food at the Connecticut State Police Training Academy. Given to the state police by the Connecticut State Police, the dog assisted in its first search warrant in June pinpointing a thumb drive containing child pornography hidden four layers deep in a tin box inside a metal cabinet. That discovery led the police to secure an arrest warrant, Yelle says. “If it has a memory card, he’ll sniff it out,” Detective Adam Houston, Thoreau’s handler, says.
I had no idea the contents of a physical drive changed its smell!
This is very intriguing!
Any Memory?? what judge will go on just that?
Uh, yeah. Most judges rubber-stamp search warrants.
Also, does concealing a memory device now automatically imply child porn?
The cops get bolder every year, and people just go along.
Cop: "I asked him for his ID, and he went fishing in a pocket. IT COULD HAVE BEEN A GUN OR KNIFE, SO I SHOT HIM".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
i guess if dogs can smell memory sneakernets into dictatorships to provide outside information is doomed. i wonder can they smell a blu-ray too? cause 25 GB is a lot of storage...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The dog is not being used to establish probable cause, it is being used to aid in the execution of a search warrant where probable cause has already been established.
>where probable cause has already been established.
Or where a suitably incriminating memory stick has been prepared just in case there isn't one inside the metal box
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Have gnu, will travel.
Also, does concealing a memory device now automatically imply child porn?
Where have you been the last ten years? Trying to conceal anything at all from a law enforcement officer implies you're up to something. Only criminals insist on privacy now, citizen!
One step closer to 'thoughtcrime' ;(
Side note, there's a shortage of dogs capable of doing real work, like search and rescue. why waste good talent on this shit? I can't think of a reason this should ever be an issue.
Is the end game going to be that whenever going through customs all storage will be scanned and stored "just in case"? :(
It's not the dog that decides if the car contains drugs. It's the handler. If the handler wants to see a search carried out, the dog will find something suspicious.
Child pornography is the Digital Godwin. So if budget has to be made available, and ridicule from the thinking part of the world ensured, this is a valid argument.
Imagine, if you will, people filming murders and then trading those videos around.
Then arrest the murderers. This is not hard. Stop trying to push draconian laws and censorship on everyone else.
I think the problem is that the video drives people to create more. Making it illegal to possess them might cut down on the child abuse happening. If that's not good enough, then consider it a form of copyright infringement to possess said videos.
Not only do you have no good scientific proof that this is true, but even if it were true, censorship is 100% intolerable even if it did cut down on crimes.
As for copyright, that needs to be gotten rid of as well.
Imagine if you were kidnapped, raped, while being videotaped. Should said video be allowed to circulate all in the name of anti-censorship?
Absolutely.
While I feel copyright reform needs to be dealt with, I don't believe it should be gotten rid of.
The problem is, there is no valid scientific proof that it's even effective to begin with. Furthermore, it violates free speech rights (to enforce it, censorship is often required) and private property rights (Can't have people sending certain non-private data using their own equipment!). I would oppose it outright solely because of the latter two reasons combined.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It is the self-important nobodies like you that are special.
In a country where most people support the TSA, the NSA's surveillance, free speech zones, protest permits, DUI checkpoints, copyrights, patents, stop-and-frisk, unrestricted border searches, constitution-free zones, mass public surveillance conducted by the government, anti-gun laws, plea bargains, or some form of warrantless wiretapping in general, it is not difficult to be "special"; you just have to oppose all of those things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's kinda remarkable how rarely Mythbusters bust a law-enforcement myth, or fail to bust an evasion myth.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Also, does concealing a memory device now automatically imply child porn?
This is a fine argument for universal use of full-disk encryption.
And I sincerely hope that real child pornographers get it wrong.
Even so, let's drop political correctness and tell it like it is: our culture embraced "innocent until proven guilty" and "freedom from unreasonable search and seizure" for very good reasons. While we can all agree that harming children is abhorrent, removing those rights and freedoms from society at large does far more harm, to more people, and is the greater evil.