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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.
Any Memory?? what judge will go on just that?
hidden four layers deep why that for a USB stick? doing that will make them want to look at the data.
Just shipping them unhidden is more likely to just pass though
Can he packet sniff?
I had no idea the contents of a physical drive changed its smell!
This is very intriguing!
you need to be on the jury.
While child pornography is bad the lost of rights / junk science to by pass your rights is much worse
Your Honor, this person of interest may have hard drives or thumb drives, and these types of storage devices are commonly used to store CHILD PORNOGRAPHY OHHHH GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!! WHY WONT YOU PROTECT THE BABY JESUS??????"
Warrant granted -- get those scumbags. And I wont cry if they die before seeing a jail cell!
Typical government bureaucracy, relying on outdated technology.
Nearly 10 years ago, top minds in the private industry already developed super dogs that not only detected DVDs but could also determine the legal status of said DVDs by smell alone.
Let's get this out of the way. Search tactics using dogs is always going to be prone to abuse. However, dogs have been sniffing out electronics for years now. Additionally, and this should be obvious, the dog isn't sniffing out hard drives that contain child pornography, it's merely sniffing out all hard drives. In this case, the dog was deployed as the result of a search warrant that undoubtedly allowed for the seizure of all electronic devices within the home. Use in this manner is much less controversial than using the dog to find the drive, thus establishing probable cause to bypass a warrant entirely.
If it is in your home, one would assume a great many things would smell like you, namely your clothes bed, couch, fridge, chairs, table, door handles, bathrooms, and any number of other things that would all register as false positives were that the case.
As the drugs war winds down... another war on freedom starts.
I am not surprised that the reporter is a technical illiterate who cant tell memory from storage, but surely the submitter or the editor one could show half a brain cell working and correct it?
All the devices mentioned are storage, not "memory".
Anyway, police dogs are a scam. Like Clever Hans, they are more attuned to their trainers emotions than s/he is, and can baffle and impress the unwary with seemingly impossible tricks as a result. Granting a warrant based on a dog alerting is effectively the same thing as granting it because a cop has a hunch.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Have gnu, will travel.
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"? :(
That will be the new reality. Enter the country without any electronic equipment. Buy from a 2nd hand computer/recycling shop. Use new storage in computer at one secure location via a trusted VPN and no driving around with your cheap laptop. Return computer without storage when done. Exit.
The big risk was having your laptop like device cloned at the border. Now just having a computer is part of a civil forfeiture risk.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Impressive how these dogs can detect "storage with child porn", as opposed to storage with business data. It would be interesting to try some stenography tests, to see if the dogs can sniff through that as well. Maybe the stored data has some karmatic "bits of intent" floating around that the dogs can detect, just like they can implicitly growl at burglars but not ordinary visitors.
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.
There was a Mythbusters where they tried to fool a drug dog. I only caught the tail end of it (no pun intended) and the only attempt I saw was the target item inside a suitcase with dirty diapers in a room full of suitcases. If I remember the wrap-up scene the dog always found the target.
I'm curious what else they tried to trick the dogs with. The cynic in me believes the cops wouldn't have cooperated if they had actually come up with a technique that worked.
I wonder if vacuum sealing works -- presuming of course you wash the exterior of the vacuum sealed container and possibly double-bagged it. I use a FoodSaver model for food items and since the sealed bag holds a vacuum, presumably there's no way for the odor to migrate out.
I have heard nobody actually applaud it other than the entities themselves and the people who profit from them.
Nobody!? Wow. You haven't paid any sort of attention at all. You've never seen someone support copyrights or patents? How about DUI checkpoints? People ignore the fact that these things violate people's fundamental liberties and/or the constitution because they think it will keep them safe from something, as if that's a justification in a country that's supposed to be 'the land of the free.'
So yeah, if you think that most people are not in support of any of that, I think you're absolutely incorrect.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.