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Meet URL, the USB Porn-Sniffing Dog (cnn.com)
HughPickens.com writes: CNN reports that URL, the porn-sniffing dog, is the newest crime-fighting tool at the Weber County Sheriff's office with a nose that could help put away some of the country's most predatory and dangerous criminals. URL (pronounced Earl) sniffs out electronic storage media. Still just a pup, the 18-month-old K-9 is one of fewer than two dozen such dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices. While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it, they are able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss. Detective Cameron Hartman points to the high-profile case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who was convicted on child pornography and other charges last year. A K-9 named Bear, who was trained by the same man who trained URL, led investigators to hidden thumb drives inside Fogle's home. The U.S. Attorney's office for Southern Indiana confirmed those devices contained evidence against Fogle. URL has found evidence relating to pornography during the execution of search warrants for the task force in several investigations of child sex crimes and child trafficking. "He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
I can never find my USB drives and SD cards. Say what you like about spinning disc, at least they were (are) easy to keep track of.
So here's a possible solution, and a market for recycled electronics.
Start a business that grinds old (but relatively modern) electronics into a fine powder that can be dusted around anyplace you want to keep your stuff hidden from the pigs. The dog will be useless.
as parallel construction.
1) Having a flash card is not a crime ...."Whether it’s child porn, terrorism intelligence, narcotics or financial crimes information, "...
2) Having a flash card concealed is not a crime
3) Having a flash card concealed that contains porn is not a crime
4) Possession of child porn is a crime.
You make a blind false *blanket* accusation, which you then use to justify a blanket fishing expedition, which you occasionally catch a criminal.
Your dog cannot sniff out child porn, terrorist intelligence, data on narcotics, or data on financial crimes. You just haven't been stopped in your random searches yet, and you hope by marketing this miracle dog the courts won't take action.
Either:
a) You are a liar doing blanket searches and occasionally catching someone.
b) You are hiding parallel construction (i.e. being given evidence illegally obtained by mass surveillance and then using a dog to conceal the source of that evidence to fool the courts).
c) You pick a victim and set the dog on them, this has been done in drugs cases where the dog is used to sniff around cars and signalled to give a bark which is then used as excuse to justify a search you already decided you wanted to make.
I recall this:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/federal-court-rules-search-laptop-border-unreasonable/
A Korean man was stopped at the border, his laptop cloned and searched for evidence while he was detained for hours (missing his flight).. 'on a hunch'. They had a hunch he might have data on illegal sales of exports.... on a hunch.... and lo and behold they found some evidence on that hunch.
The court was not fooled and suppressed the evidence. There was no way an expensive forensic data search was done on a hunch. It was likely parallel construction to conceal a previous illegal hack or search.
It wouldn't matter. Police dogs "alert" (sit down, or scratch, or something - anything the dog does can be an "alert") whenever and whenever the handler wants them too.
In one test, the researchers told the cops they wanted to test the dogs. They set up eights cans and told the handlers "there are drugs in can #1 and can #4, let's see how the dogs do". The dogs consistently alerted on can #1 and can #4. The drugs were in #6 and #8 - the officer's expectations matter more than where the contraband actually is.
See also:
http://illinoistimes.com/artic...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Is this a voodoo divining rod, or an actually-useful tool? It's hard to tell in the field, with so much electronic stuff everywhere.
Probably not Voodoo. I doubt that a dog would ever be brought in to sniff for thumb drives in general, but there was already a case building against Fogle, and they just were looking for corroborating evidence. As for the smell of electronics, hell I can smell them, so I'm certain that a dog will do just fine.
The smell of electronics would be on everything, and the dog wouldn't be able to sniff out anything useful.
Depends on who and when you are looking for something. Using Fogle's example, they are going to take every piece of electronic storage in the house and go over it as part of the criminal investigation. A false positive means nothing, they'll just move on to the next thing the doggo alerts at. Outside of a criminal investigation, the doggo probably won't ever be used - at least for that. There's just too many of the devices sitting around.
I fear you might not know just how accurate some critter's sense of smell is.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Now I can finally find out what device my porn is on and what contains my presentation! It's always so embarrassing to plug in that USB stick and hear my boss mutter "Say, didn't we see that last week... no wait, that was last night..."
Unfortunately the subject line is as usual completely bogus and the dog simply finds electronic devices. Which is essentially useless. Yes, you might find the odd hidden USB device, but since it's not the device but its content that is "dangerous" when found, criminals will adapt and store incriminating evidence off site and encrypted.
So what is that story, essentially? A heads-up for criminals?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... a police officer decides that he does not like your face and "magically" find a hidden USB drive in your luggage in places where you would never think of putting one? Where I live no one trusts the police (for good reason), and if the possession of something small and easy to plant as a USB stick becomes a crime so will be even more reason for me to avoid the US as one avoids a city infested by ebola.
P.S: No, I not a international terrorist or something like that (only the Dark Lord of Hell, but this is not a crime right?). But I'm not willing to test my chances facing a TSA gorilla and ruin my vacation because he had not liked my face.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
No, they detect *ALL* flash media, even if it is totally and completely unrelated to porn.
Has anyone ever heard of that?
bickerdyke
Man's best friend, my ass. Hahahaha
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
I assume the dog's name is pronounced "Earl" and not "You-Are-El" so it probably shouldn't be all caps (unless his name is actually "Uniform Resource Locator" which actually would be clever since he locates "resources" for people in uniforms).
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That's what the article is suggesting. The dog can't sniff for porn, but it can sniff for flash memory, and is being used to identify flash memory that may be concealed in non-obvious locations.
Thirty four characters live here.
You sound lucky enough to have never dealt with American Police.
Getting your shit back after seizure, innocent or not, is difficult at best and pointless at worst.
Yeah. Because 100% of porn is illegal child pornography.
Let's be real here:
Having a storage device doesn't mean that the state needs to know what's stored on it.
Having a storage device doesn't mean that the content is pornographic and/or illegal.
Having a storage device doesn't mean that you're a criminal.
And yet you get treated as such.
But Drug dogs work perfectly for law enforcement: they provide whatever answer the police want and the gullible public believe the dogs are infallible.
I fear you might not know just how accurate some critter's sense of smell is.
You might just not know how dogs behave.
If search dogs work then the dog should be fine to hunt these without the handler there at all. Just let the dog search on his or her own.
Search and rescue dogs work this way just fine every day. You let them go and they hunt down people easily that you or I cannot see or hear or smell.
But any person who raises and breeds and trains dogs professionally knows the first and only thing a well trained dog wants is to please the handler. That's the definition of well and trained for a dog. Drug sniffing dogs are very well trained.
In the hands of their handler a dog is just a dowsing rod for the man with the leash. Combine that with objects that conveniently fit in an officer's pocket and the long history of corrupt government officials. You shouldn't have plausible evidence. You should have plausible deniability. Yes, dogs are great at finding skunks or burnt joints you might be able to smell yourself. Not so much for things in air-tight closed containers on in piles of stuff that smells exactly like it.
But like you demonstrate, most people don't know how dogs behave. (Or how to spot magical thinking.)
Keep the handler away from the dog. Let it search on its own. Otherwise he or she is just a furry four-legged lie detector.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
About the average slashdot user, this is true they most likely don't care at all.
But how about:
* Somebody who they suspect is a criminal but they haven't been able to find real evidence of a crime
* (key) members of protest groups
* Reporters who cover stories they don't like
* Informants to reporters
* Pretty much anyone else they don't like, or - as the OP said - "he had not liked my face"
Now maybe it's not your face they don't like, but the fact that they were already having a pissy day and you decided to be firm in your choice to go for the pat-down rather than get backscatter X-rayed, or whatever other things sets off they "you do not respect my authoritay" vibe...
URL is trained to sniff out USB sticks that have Vaseline remnants on them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Keep voting for an all-powerful government - and reap what you sow.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
"He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
Maybe, just maybe, he didn't smell the USB flash drive that was in a closed jar inside a box. Maybe, just maybe, he smelled the residue that the owner had left on the outside of the box when putting the flash drive away.
It's very, very challenging to completely isolate something from ordor-based detection. You need to work with clean instruments and put the item in a clean container, operating ideally in a clean environment. Then, because you probably slightly contaminated the outside of the bag, you need to do it again, with a completely new set of clean instruments, in a new, clean environment. And then you probably need to do it again. And probably again.
Otherwise, the owner might as well have just rubbed the flash drive on the outside of the box.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You'd think a porn sniffing dog might detect the faint scent of jizz on the usb sticks. Would probably start hitting on the cop's crotch and hand.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
>Um huh, give me the citations of exactly how dogs olfactory organs operate. And thanks, I'm always happy to be edumacated by an expert. Here's the thing. and this is what will happen.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-010-0373-2/fulltext.html
Apparently, what a dog smells is very much determined by if the handler wants to find something there or not.
Is that link scientific enough for you?
If they're so concerned about cleanliness, why do they wipe the shit off their assess with their bare hands?
Because their toilet roll is sacred?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Child porn is certainly illegal, and that's what they use these dogs to look for, with a warrant as well.
There was an older article on slashdot about this same subject, the dogs can smell the flash, drives not the how the individual bits are arranged. Also I wonder how they can tell if if they are flash drives, and not just some other random integrated circuit with chips...
I was skimming the summery and about halfway through I was thinking they were talking about some device that they plug your thumb drive into and it detects weather it contains porn or not, which is dubious enough; but then I suddenly realized that it was a literal dog named URL (in all caps) and suddenly I couldn't decide which of those two things is stupider.
I'm sure the dog is happy, it doesn't know that its job is total bullshit. Ignorance truly is bliss.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
It solves one problem but creates many more since case law isn't settled on if you have a right to be silent regarding encryption keys.
Another reason the Muslim religion is full of fucking wack jobs.
Anybody who believes this shit or follows this shit is inherently a sucker.
Keep voting for an all-powerful government - and reap what you sow.
But that's the only choice they've given me!