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Police Departments Are Training Dogs To Sniff Out Thumb Drives (cnet.com)
A CNET report provides some insight on an elite K-9 search class that trains dogs to sniff out electronics, including phones, hard drives and microSD cards smaller than your thumb. From the report: Only one out of every 50 dogs tested qualifies to become an electronic storage detection, or ESD, dog, says Kerry Halligan, a K-9 instructor with the Connecticut State Police. That's because it's a lot harder to detect the telltale chemical in electronics than it is to sniff out narcotics, bombs, fire accelerants or people, she says. But Labrador retrievers like Harley, with their long snouts and big muzzles, can pick up even the faintest olfactory clues. These tech-seeking dogs are helping law enforcement find child pornography stashed in hidden hard drives, uncover concealed phones, nab white-collar evidence kept on hard drives and track calls stored on SIM cards. The most famous case occurred in 2015, when a Labrador retriever named Bear found a hidden flash drive containing child pornography in the home of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle. The district attorney called the discovery vital to Fogle's conviction.
These tech-seeking dogs are helping law enforcement find child pornography stashed in hidden hard drives, uncover concealed phones, nab white-collar evidence kept on hard drives and track calls stored on SIM cards.
Track calls? That's SOME nose on them dogs.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
They use the dogs on rooms that all visible electronics have already been removed, so only hidden electronics would be in the room.
People used to make clothing out of AOL CDs. Crooks can just make them out of thumb drives now.
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder if pot-sniffing dogs can be retrained to do something useful, in saner states which are legalizing...
What about my thumb drive that blasts out anhydrous ammonia when fuzz-fido's nose gets close? That will be the last thing the pooch ever smells.
"Put the criminal content on a small disk and no one will ever find it if I hide it."
Also, it's a small disk and easy to lose and have some random person in your social circle find by accident.
My money is on this being a very good investment for the police in the long run because most people are idiots and they'll never figure out the weakness in the quoted argument.
The dogs, they can sniff out the blue smoke before it escapes. Good dog!
Seriously, what is the chemical they're looking for?
X sniffing dogs mostly don't work. They're just probable cause on a leash. I'm not saying that dogs can't sniff some of this stuff. I'm saying most of the time, they're just used to get around the constitution by a zealous cop.
Almost everything that plugs into an outlet has integrated circuits and boards these days. If one wanted to hide something, hide it in "plain sniff" inside something innocuous like a dishwasher control panel or an LED light bulb...
Why would the handlers need to signal the dog when they 'find' the USB drive that's been hidden in the dogs collar?
Doesn't matter what the dog sniffs. If they stick their noise in your belongings that establishes enough probable cause for a search. Might as well use a dousing rod.
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Hide it in something that would mask the smell, if the other smell over-rides the smell of say an SD card no dog will find it. Hide it in the garlic powder or curry powder bottle.
ESD = ElectroStatic Discharge
Second, no one told these folks that ESD stands for Electro-Static Discharge?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Iâ(TM)ve lost at least 5 usb drives here somewhere!
Any time the government wants to go fishing for something to charge someone with, they immediately say it's because of child porn. It's a catch-all.
Want someone made guilty? Claim child porn, then fish for other evidence.
Extrajudicial State Dog Of Guilt
Then it seems pretty easy to circumvent this... just hide your electronics inside other electronics.
A shake test for the altered laptop to hear how many 512gb microSD cards are hidden away?
A new 3D X-ray system to have the exact 3d dimensions of the cards?
A 3d X-ray machine to detect the structure and metal content of a 512gb microSD card?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... don't leave media laying about unencrypted. They store 1 card with data encrypted and obfuscated mixed in with truly blank cards. So the first thing that happens is trying to figure out if there is actually any data that can be retrieved, which there definitely should not be unless they are just chasing noobs.
Going to coat all of my thumb drives in liverwurst so the police dog eats the evidence...
So now owning a flash drive is the same as having a 'criminal tool'? So you get pulled over and have a flash drive in your vehicle should we expect to have the car towed away? Arrested for having a criminal tool if pulled over for speeding? And in many major cities have your cars taken from you by the law to be sold off.
Socialism and communism at its worse. When will people learn what it is they are supporting when they vote Democrat-Socialist party.
So a flash drive can have extremely common silicone that's on most phone cases, steel casing around the USB that's on most phones and charging cables, flash memory which is in every phone, a small circuitboard that's in everything, and a plastic casing that everything is made out of. What exactly is unique about flash drives that they're supposed to be smelling?
More like they just need some phony reason to justify unreasonable search and seizure
In the 'good old days', and officer could just swear that they 'smelled the odor of marijuana' to get a free pass to search without a warrant, now they just need some dog with a vest on and the ability to read the 'signal'.
I think that Benjamin Franklin said, 'It's okay to give up your basic rights if it is "for the children"'.... right?
Dogs may not actually have a better sense of smell than humans. They might not even be demonstrably effective at sniffing out drugs. Nevertheless, they can read when the police want them to "find" something. Thumb drives aren't illegal yet, but chances are you don't need to be a dog to make some educated guesses about where to look where one would secret a thumb drive. The only things dogs do for policemen is make it so that policemen don't have to crouch around and sniff things, as people would stop respecting the badge after a while.
It's really hard to train a dog to alert on an undetectable command.
Why the dog is sniffing your bum. The phone's, hard drives, thumb drives and sd card are all stuffed up your arse you dirty bugger!
I'm always losing thumb drives. There must be half a dozen of them in my house that I have no idea where they are. If I could hire one of these dogs to come by and find them all for me, that would be great!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
If a dog chews up your SD card, the cops won't get much information off it
Modern packet sniffers.
Put a small dot of a dog stimulating substance on the circuit boards. It's just like those non-metallic knives that have a metallic core for improved detection with the metal detectors.
The implication is that the K9 sniffing == probable cause. It is a very weak legal concept that things not hidden are searchable/confiscatable and so the dog allows the handler to search without a warrant.
Someone did an interesting experiment. They invited police dogs, with their handlers, to an experiment. There were drugs hidden in certain places in a room. The test was explained to the cops "we want to see if your dog finds the drugs hidden under the blue bowl". The dogs all reliably signaled on the blue bowl.
The drugs were, of course, under the red bowl. The dog /handlers reliably signaled where the handler wanted them to, and not where the drugs were.
That's not to say there aren't a FEW dogs and handlers who are very good. The majority of them completely fail basic tests.
Compress your incriminating evidence as heavily as you can usefully compress it, encrypt it, and use stenography to conceal it in something mundane, like photographs of officers in action and random government buildings, and store them in an innocent location on a device in plain sight. Then put red herrings and verifiably generated pseudo-random data on concealed obsolete media.
So if someone is charged the dog will have to testify?
What happens when the dog can't speak human?
The Australian state that put sniffer dogs in train stations now wants sniffer dogs to equal a presumption of guilt. This will be used to evict 'guilty' people from the premises.
This will be one more reason for police harassment and interference.
Put the thumb drive in a bag of weed.
Psyche!!!
Compress your incriminating evidence as heavily as you can usefully compress it, encrypt it, and use stenography to conceal it in something mundane, like photographs of officers in action and random government buildings, and store them in an innocent location on a device in plain sight. Then put red herrings and verifiably generated pseudo-random data on concealed obsolete media.
you gotta be a special kind of stupid to think you need to keep a copy of incriminating evidence in your possession
Just use pigs. No amount of truffle, doesn't matter how tiny, can remain unnoticed by them. Instant end of truffle smuggling.
[Citation needed.]
I use a USB stick with an micro SD card. Will they find the stick or the card?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
olfactory.newInstance().sniff()
They're just part of the Security Theatre.
What makes them think ESD dogs will be any better?
This comment high lights the reality of drug sniffing dogs. Did the same person who put the drugs under the bowl, handle the other bowl and hence spoiled the experiment. In the case of dogs sniffing electronics, well, that is a scam and lie and devious misdirection. So what did they sniff, why the person handling the device and the device is likely to be pretty onerous considering what the person is doing and will be handling the device before and after. So smelling the person and not the device but the whole house should smell of the person, a little yes but anything they touch with smelly body parts will smell more. The reason US police dogs fail, largely because county mounties and they don't really care and are just filling quota and the dog is not properly trained and is just for show and for occasionally eating people randomly for fun. US law enforcing dogs perform badly because training is poor and the training is poor because they don't care about results, they will just lie any how and corrupt courts will back it up.
Best prank at concert with drug sniffing dogs, coat the ground on approaches with bong water and let the fun begin as everyone who steps in it, is arrested for drugs in their shoes.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Place USB sticks in high places.
...you are a failed experiment spiraling down the toilet bowl of authoritarianism....
I'm surprised this got a +5 interesting without any actual evidence of the study or even a link to an article.
I've been to a training academy for police dogs. I got to hide the contraband myself and the handlers were not present. All 3 dogs being trained that day had no problem locating the stash.
Can the handlers have an influence on the dog? Absolutely. That is likely poor training of the handler, though.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I did not find the study the GPP referred to, but I have seen several studies indicating that drug and explosive sniffing dogs tend to signal where the handler thinks there is something to be found. Here is a link to an article about one such study: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/w...
And I believe that this is the paper on the study referenced in that article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
If this technique is used solely to locate hidden devices which are known to exist, and not as an excuse to search for hidden devices which are suspected to exist, I would find it acceptable. The problem is that I am quite confident that if the handler suspects that the person has a hidden External Storage Device, the dog will signal that the person does have one, giving the handler and excuse to conduct a warrant less search of the person and/or their belongings...and if the handler finds such a device it will be admissible even if it is not in the location the dog signaled.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Here's an article:
http://bigthink.com/neurobonke...
About this similar study:
https://link.springer.com/arti...
I'm sure you can find more with about 60 seconds on Google.
> Can the handlers have an influence on the dog? Absolutely. That is likely poor training of the handler, though.
Cop wants to search your car. The cop has been trained that if he says the dog alerted on your car, the court will allow the search. Cop says the dog alerted on your car, and gets to search it. That's totally successful as far as the cops are concerned.
The cops have no incentive to refrain from arbitrary searches.
If training dogs to search for electronics is primarily useful for child pornography, then I think this means the cops have determined there are a WHOLE LOT of child pornographers. It's probably something like 4 out of 5 people. Are you in a room with 4 other people? Then you are probably one of them.
Or could it be that they're totally and completely lying, to such an outrageous degree that it's painfully obvious to everyone, about what these dogs are for. Like, it's not about child pornography and it's actually about finding any reason to nail whatever suspect that you wish to, by fishing through everyone's storage and hoping to find anything. Whoops, you have unlicensed Cult of Scientology IP on here! Whoops, that image in your cache is copyrighted by Disney!
Nah, I'll go with the first idea. Everyone is into kiddie porn. Everyone. That seems more believable.
AW GREAT! THANKS A LOT! Now I can't hide my datastash under the red bowl anymore.
('let the cat out of the bag', why don'cha?)
Just because the dogs can actually be trained to find the stuff, does not mean that they will not also "signal" on subtle cues from their handlers as well. I think we all know the science behind how well dogs can detect smells isn't just some bogus claim the police use to end-run the Constitution. And yet, there is plenty of research into this issue and a LOT more anecdotal evidence to back up the idea that police dogs are misused at an alarming level.
However, one does get tired of the "citation needed" defense in a casual chat forum like this when a simple Google search for "drug dog fake signal" will easily find you many articles and links on the topic. You know, many of us have read a lot of these articles, but we don't keep a wikipedia-like list of links available for proving our point here on Slashdot.
I do not have a signature
The resins used to package devices really do have a peculiar odor. This has been a known thing since they were invented. Even humans can smell it.
By the way, there are workarounds. But, like the odor, too obvious to figure out.
I don't think these cops understand the will of the people. They seem incapable of learning. The only thing that will stop them is dis-empowerment and legal restrictions that lead prosecution in the courts with jail time.
No; it had nothing to do with the experiment being spoiled. The reality is, the police demand to know where the drugs are hidden in the tests so that if the dog "fails to alert" the handler can immediately "correct" (i.e. punish) the dog for "getting it wrong".
Dogs can do some amazing things if well-trained. Police dogs, unfortunately, are poorly trained for this kind of work. In practice, the training is aimed at pleasing the handler instead of reliably finding things the handler doesn't know about.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/01/07/132738250/report-drug-sniffing-dogs-are-wrong-more-often-than-right
One of the sheriffs in Illinois is arguing that if the state legalizes pot all the police dogs will have to be put down.
BS. Detection dogs and patrol dogs are separate training programs. Detection dogs have not been trained to attack.
Not BS. The Sheriff's argument was that they cannot retrain the dogs to remove pot from the list of things they will hit on (which is true). It's absurd to say they have to euthanize the dogs, but the dogs WOULD have to be removed from service, because the dog can't tell you what it found, only that it found something that it's trained to search for. Every drug dealer would just keep a small quantity of pot for a dog to smell, no probable cause for a search.
You misunderstand, I apologize for not being clear. The BS is that they have to be euthanized. My point is that detection dogs pose no more of a threat to the public than civilian dogs, that detection dogs have *not* been trained and conditioned to intimidate, threaten and bite people. Euthanizing dogs is something that the military had historically done to patrol dogs due to such training and/or actual combat experience. I believe the modern trend is for the military to attempt to re-train the dogs to be less aggressive and more tolerant, to (re)familiarize them with the civilian world, etc (some were fostered as pups to families). I think police have historically leaned towards the latter, to retire their patrol dogs with the handler/family that they have lived with for years. Living with a family while on active duty may better socialize the police dogs compared to the military dogs which may spend too much time in kennels. In any case, detection dogs, police or military, were never trained to attack so there is no increased risk to civilian retirement.
Yes, they can absolutely smell electronics. I can smell electronics that are new from the factory.
They will also "hit" anywhere they think the handler wants them to hit, but don't kid yourself that the dogs don't know where things are. That's playing into their hands, because it means that all they have to do is prove that dogs really can smell stuff, and your argument is deflated. And dogs really can smell electronics and all kinds of other crap.
Yes, the dogs will find actual stashes. But they'll also alert on nonexistent stashes, if they believe they should (especially if reward-trained -- then you get "offered" behavior). As the Springer link lays out: Handler expectations influence the behavior of trained dogs, and even when you =think= you're giving no cues, the dog will pick up on it.
[pro dog trainer here; doesn't surprise me in the least, especially with highly reactive breeds like German Shepherds.]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
the HDD case full of them in a nice carrying sleeve. They won't rattle, won't alter the weight much, and the HDD case will shield the xray machines. You can wrap the carry sleeve with some screen or something if you're extra paranoid.
C'mon Hux, you claim to be smart. Use your imagination every once in awhile.
Will this work? https://www.cannabisculture.co...
AC the "Use your imagination every once in awhile." was a way to sell all airports on upgraded scanning systems to detect hidden microSD cards :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
But can they sniff a virtual machine inside a machine ?