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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.
Can he packet sniff?
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.
Does bubble wrap count as concealing now?
If so how can you safely ship stuff like HDD's with USPS, UPS, FEDEX with out damage?
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
Hell I can smell a bluray. Optical storage has a far bigger and more unique odor than a usb stick.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Typical government bureaucracy, relying on outdated technology.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.
If so how can you safely ship stuff like HDD's with USPS, UPS, FEDEX with out damage?
Include a few dried habanero peppers in the package.
Yeah that's my real worry about all this child porn stuff - "everyone" turns their brains off and starts getting their pitchforks ready to lynch you.
;).
Guess how convenient this is if the powers that be want to get rid of inconvenient you...
And for what? Even if some pervert watches child porn doesn't make him a rapist or molester any more than you wanking off to "normal porn"[1] makes you a rapist or molester. If you say he's supporting child porn, then you should follow the money and jail those responsible for creating it. If he's torrenting it, then using the **AA's logic, he's killing the child porn industry
[1] in some countries "normal porn" is illegal. Go figure.
A search cannot be legally executed unless there is probable cause established before hand.
1. That's naive. It's quite common to conduct a search and then dream up the probable cause later.
2. Establishing probable cause is easier than most people think.
3. They don't need probable cause to search when crossing the border of the country.
4. Or when you're within an area referred to as a 'buffer zone' or 'national security corridor', which extends something like 100 miles from the international border itself, and can go even further in some cases.
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"? :(
Since the dog can't smell memory, it must have been trained to smell something about the electronic components. That's bound to trigger a LOT of false positives in the modern world.
:P
This might be a fun thing to do. Get a lot of old flash drives, sd cards, and the like, the old super cheap ones of course, and stick them everywhere. Under the carpet, taped to the bottom of the drawers, in the hem of the curtain, etc. After 30 or 40 of them, somebody is going to get sick of playing that game, and it might be the dog, If you're really mean, store a picture of a treasure map on each one, and maybe some lists of random hexadecimal numbers.
It'll drive them nuts. To really get the point across when they ask, just tell them the truth, that it's a joke, there's absolutely nothing of value stored on them, and yes, you want them back and undamaged.
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
No judge will go on that......in this case, the police had been following the guy compiling evidence for seven months before getting a warrant. The guy was abusing a 7 year old girl and taking pictures of her. They brought the dog in after the search warrant was obtained, because a lot of times child-molesters hide the pictures on small SD cards in ceiling tiles or something. At least read the article before getting outraged. Even if it's not as fun.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Maybe you can help me find my copy of Step Brothers.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Since the dog can't smell memory, it must have been trained to smell something about the electronic components. That's bound to trigger a LOT of false positives in the modern world.
Officer: "May I see your driver's license and registration?"
Driver: "Yes, here it is."
Officer: "I noticed that your middle interior brake light is out and a little bit back you swerved."
Driver: "Yes, I know the light is out, I just haven't had the time and money to get it fixed. And I swerved because a saw a small rabbit hop toward the road on the other side of a tree."
Police Dog: "Bark! Bark! Bark bark! Bark!"
Officer: "Alright, so have you done any drugs?"
Driver: "No."
Officer: "Do you have any drugs in the car?"
Driver: "No, I told you I don't do any drugs."
Officer: "Well my dog smells something suspecious, so I have the probable cause required by law to search your car."
*officer opens glove compartment; dog gets excited"
Officer: [saying quietly under his breath:] "Shit, it's just a fuse box."
Officer: "Looks [smells?] like you've got a burnt fuse there, buddy. You might want to get that fixed."
Driver: "I know. It's been blown for about two weeks. My interior lighting doesn't work."
Officer: [silently thinking to himself:] "I guess I'm going to have to find some other way to nab this guy or work on finding someone else to nail. I need to meet my quota for this month."
For some reason, I *totally* imagine that or a similar situation occuring, and probably more than a few times in the future...
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.
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.
Bullshit. Swordfighting hasn't been common in thefts for centuries. I don't even think you can legally walk around with a real sword any more.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
And the supreme court ruled that even if there is evidence that the dog was broken or the handler was lying (a case where a dog supposedly indicated on the same guy twice and no drugs were found either time) as long as there is some test in the past that indicates that the dog works that there is no evidence of misconduct on the part of either the dog or handler.
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.