A new patent by Detroit automaker Ford may make future Ford cars owners snitches on speeding drivers to law enforcement agencies. The technology works passively using cameras, LIDAR and radar devices mounted around a vehicle to monitor the speed of other vehicles. If speeding is detected, relevant data is forwarded...Read more...
Detroit's Police Department has been banned from relying on facial recognition results alone to conduct arrests or lineups (i.e. identity parade). It's not an outright ban on the technology, but now requires the DPD conduct actual investigative processes on top of that. This comes following the fallout from the city...Read more...
A new report claims that a law enforcement app leaked the personal details of suspects and police officers involved in major police operations going all the way back to 2011. SweepWizard, the app in question, was developed by ODIN Intelligence to help police coordinate multi-agency raids, such as Operation Protect the...Read more...
Earlier this year, multiple US law enforcement agencies completed a joint operation with authorities from the United Kingdom, Europol, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, and Romania. This coordinated police action, dubbed Operation TOURNIQUET, culminated in the seizure of the RaidForums domain names, as well as the arrest of...Read more...
Popular portrayals of hackers tend to show them as computer geniuses who use their elite technical skills to breach computer systems. However, in real life, bad actors often don’t bother to directly hack computer systems when they can access those same systems by hacking people instead. People are often willing to...Read more...
Police in San Francisco got the surprise of their lives when a car they were attempting to pull over had no driver. The driverless taxi owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, was lurking in the night without its headlights on.
Autonomous vehicles are being tested for multiple purposes around the world...Read more...
"Gotta catch ‘em all" certainly takes on a new meaning depending on your purpose. In the case of two Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers, this meant Pokémon instead of robbers. A California appellate court has recently ruled that two LAPD officers who decided to play Pokémon Go rather than responding to a...Read more...
The same group of hackers that hit the NBA's Houston Rockets basketball team with a ransomware attack earlier this month has now turned its sights on the police force in Washington, D.C. It is the latest in a string of concerning ransomware attacks aimed at police over the past several weeks, where data leaks can put...Read more...
Amazon says that customer data requests from law enforcement agencies around the United States increased significantly during the first half of 2020. Amazon unveiled statistics on the number of customer data requests from government agencies during its latest transparency report published late last week. The figures...Read more...
You might think that a criminal planning a bank robbery would at least do a little research beforehand; rule numero uno is that you never rent the getaway vehicle in your own name. An alleged bank robber named Luca Mangiarano clearly didn't do his research. Police allege that 19-year-old Mangiarano robbed a BBVA...Read more...
It's out with the old and in with the new (sort of new, anyway) for police officers at Patrol Borough Manhattan South, a large area spanning Wall Street to 59th Street. Over the weekend, the officers assembled at an old police academy in Gramercy Park to pick up their newly issued iPhone 7 handsets, as the department...Read more...
According to the National Safety Council, one-quarter of all accidents in the United States are caused by texting and driving. Approximately 330,000 people a year are injured due to accidents involving texting and driving. In order to combat the problem, some police departments in the US are currently testing the...Read more...
You better think twice before speeding down the 405. Ford has just unveiled its first “pursuit-rated” hybrid patrol car, and the Los Angeles Police Department may be one of the first agencies to get its hands on the vehicles.
Charlie Beck, Los Angeles Police Department Chief remarked, “Our mission to create safe...Read more...
It seems as though police body cameras are becoming the “new normal” for both police officers and everyday citizens across the United States. Body cameras have the ability to become an impartial eyewitness to police encounters with citizens and have the power to back up the story provided by an officer in a disputed...Read more...
Our men and women in blue have one of the toughest and oftentimes thankless jobs in the world. It is a dangerous world out there and while police officers have taken on the mission of serving and protecting the public, they have to watch their own behinds as well. To help with that, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has...Read more...
The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety has purchased several devices capable of seizing funds loaded on prepaid debit cards. These devices will be in law enforcement vehicles, and enable troopers to freeze, seize, and return stolen cards.
Troopers hope that these scanners will be useful in roadside seizures of...Read more...
Everyone hates a backseat driver. You know, the person that’s looking over your shoulder, keeping an eye on your speed and pointing out everything “wrong” that you’re doing behind the wheel. Well, given how much technology that is being crammed into automobiles these days, it’s not human passengers that we have to...Read more...
A new device from an MIT alumnus will soon be helping police assess dangerous situations from a safe distance. The softball-sized explorer triggers its six cameras when tossed into a room. It then sends the images back to police, where they are rapidly stitched into a panoramic image for tactical assessment. The...Read more...
Google announced today that its Waze app has graduated to the big leagues and has officially joined Google Mobile Services along with other “essential” apps like Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, and Google Maps. This move will give OEMs the option to preinstall Waze on their smartphones and tablets so users can enjoy the...Read more...
A few weeks ago, we brought you a story about Google’s Waze app and how law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are becoming increasingly paranoid about how the app is being used. In a nutshell, Waze allows drivers to report on road hazards, traffic jams, accidents, and of course police activity. All of this...Read more...
Ever heard of "predictive policing?" Your local police department might be savvy to the term. A company called PredPol is making a lot of money from its predictive policing software, which feeds historical crime data to a proprietary algorithm that then predicts the next dozen or so locations that are likely to see...Read more...
When we last gave you a status update on The Pirate Bay back in late December, we were given the impression that the site would make a full recovery. If you recall, earlier that month The Pirate Bay was the subject of a Swedish police raid that knocked the site offline. Since that time, the site’s operators have been...Read more...