Cop Tech Key to Iraq Fight?

All the talk is about more U.S. troops. But if there's going to be a shot in hell of winning the war in Iraq, it'll be up to the Iraqi police, argues Bing West in the current Atlantic. And those cops will need to be equipped with the latest crime-fighting gear.

In the United States, a cop who pulls you over calls up your record and finds out where and when you were last stopped, and what the charge was. The Chicago police [well, some of 'em - ed.] carry a device that takes fingerprints and transmits them over the radio, with the results of a database search received in minutes.

In Iraq, the police have no detective equipment; no reliable identification system has been widely fielded. As a result, American soldiers on patrol futilely call in [if they can even call -- ed.] the phonetic spelling of Iraqi names on whatever ID card they are handed...) A few enterprising American rifle companies have conducted their own independent censuses, employing rudimentary spreadsheets and personal digital cameras. But no central information system exists.

This is the greatest technical failure of the war. For all of our efforts, we have ignored one of the most fundamental axioms of counterinsurgency warfare: an insurgency cannot be defeated if the enemy cannot be identified.

Now, of course, tech alone isn't a solution. There needs to be a major upgrade of the Iraqi police, which West calls "among the most wretched in the world. New York City cops send some 26,000 criminals to prison every year; in Baghdad, with twenty times the murder rate, that number is at best 2,000." And the local cops are often in bed with militias like the Mahdi Army.

But "when U.S. military manpower and technology work hand in hand with" competent Iraqi cops, "the combination can be effective," West says.

Every day, aerial cameras hover over Anbar; some are mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and others on helicopters; some are infrared, others stream down video in sharp, brilliant colors. I was in a company operations center in Haditha when Captain Bert Lewis, the air officer, pointed at a screen showing a video feed... On the screen, we watched a man in a white dishdasha hastily scooping dirt over a boxy package, while cars passed by without slowing down.

"FedEx delivery," Lewis said, to general laughter. "I don't believe this dude." The Nissan drove away as the man finished packing dirt around the improvised explosive device, or IED...

"Nail that sucker," Lieutenant Joshua Booth said... The man looked up and down the street, and then ran south. The picture tilted, then zoomed in, holding him in the center of the frame. A series of black numbers scrolled along the right edge, updating the GPS coordinates. The target, solidly built and in his mid-thirties, had left the road and was now running along the riverbank...

As a Quick Reaction Force patrol closed on the GPS coordinates, the fugitive sat down in the shade of a palm tree, beckoning to someone on the river. Just as a square-nosed wooden skiff punted up to the man, the QRF, mounted in two Humvees, converged on the riverbank. The man scrambled to his feet, saw he had no place to run, and half-raised his arms to show he had no weapon.

(Big ups: PC)

Net Smuggling Ring Exposed

Over the last few weeks, the Philadelphia Inquirer has been slowly spooling out one of the most interesting, most ambitious journalistic undertakings of the year: an 8-part series -- complete with a ton of online extras -- on an Internet drug-smuggling ring, importing illegal pharmaceuticals into this country from India. Here's a snippet from the first installment. But, when you've got some time, do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Whenever DEA supervisor Jeff Breeden grew nervous, he would rub his forehead with his left hand. Now, as the arrest briefing began, Breeden dug deep into his brow.

Tomorrow's worldwide takedown of the Bansal network was to be monitored from this drab conference room overlooking Independence Mall.

The network supplied a rainbow of pills - painkillers, sleep aids, sedatives, stimulants, steroids, psychotropics, erectile-dysfunction medication. Thousands of orders a day.

Who knew who made this stuff, where it came from, what was in it? The public health risk that Internet drugs posed, Breeden thought, was incalculable.

Yet no one in DEA had ever worked a major global online pharmacy investigation. He knew it was a career case, one colleagues would always link to his name. Breeden? Yeah, he's the guy who supervised the Internet pill case out of Philly.

To take down the network, agents were using a number of weapons - surveillance, undercover buys, cell-tower pings, trash pulls, e-mail wiretaps, bank subpoenas, immigration reports, even provisions of the Patriot Act. Agents here had flown to Australia, Costa Rica and India.

As Breeden listened to the arrest briefing, he thought about everything that could go wrong.

Would foreign banks and governments cooperate? Or would they protect the targets, allowing Akhil and others to flee with millions? Would magistrates in several states authorize search warrants in time? Would the bad guys be there when agents raided their homes at dawn? Had any of them gotten wind of the premature arrest in New York? Did Akhil, as he implied in e-mails, really have a mole inside U.S. Customs?

Had they overlooked anything?

The MySpace Murders

Over the summer, I spent months investigating a triple-homicide in Tacoma, Washington. The results are in this month's Wired magazine; it's my first article as a contributing editor there.

The story centers around Daniel Varo, one of three friends shot in the head by a buddy from the MySpace online social network. When Varo died, his far-flung collection of relatives and friends gathered on MySpace, to console each other, to plan his memorial, and to vent their rage over his murder. People who had never met face-to-face suddenly became the most trusted of confidants. Along the way, they discovered that Varo didn't completely disappear when he died. Varo had had spent so much time online that scraps of his life lingered on the Web -- a ghost in the networked machines.

I'm really proud of the piece. I hope you'll give it a read.

And if you want to dive further into Varo's story, you can check out court documents, the killer's now-deleted MySpace pages, and a reporter's notebook.

Lastly, think about giving some money to Varo's memorial fund. You can make donations through PayPal to danielvaromemorialaccount@yahoo.com. Finish the story, and you'll see why this matters.

Poulsen Busts MySpace Perv

Five months ago, hacker-legend-turned-Wired-News-editor Kevin Poulsen wrote an automated script that searched MySpace's 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders. Soon, the program figured out that one -- 39-year-old Andrew Lubrano -- "was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys." Suffolk County, NY cops were alerted. And Poulsen got to go along with them, as they busted the scumbag. Reason # 987 why Poulsen is my hero.

World Cup: Time to Whoop Ass

I don't like football (read: soccer) any more than you do. But we can probably agree that the arrival of those lustful football fans on German soil for the World Cup is a good test for a multi-national security force.

A combination of Stella Artois, 30 degree heat and discussion about my native England's "chances" create a mental state capable of (and fit for) quite a lot of punishment. And it's not just the Germans that want a chance to beat the crap out of these morons.

13 Countries have queued for an opportunity to get on the action with about 80 uniformed British officers taking part in the largest joint police operation in European history. Its also worth noting the threats to this World Cup are roughly comparable to those in a modern battlefield - peaceful and violent demonstrators, far right/left wing groups, multi-ethnic /multi-religious group tensions and possible foreign terrorism will make affective security and policing a challenge.

Along with the usual surveillance equipment associated with modern sporting events, some of the 2006 World Cup technology includes:

* Fast Fingerprinting devices allowing German police to transmit identification data to be matched against archives stored in the central database of the German Federal Intelligence Service.

* Facial recognition CCTV in the stadiums will allow cameras to record biometric facial features of suspected hooligans which can be checked in real time against photos stored in the central database.

* RFID chips in more than 3 million tickets will include identification information that will be checked as holders pass through entrance gates. Those with the tickets have had to provide personal data such as name, address, nationality, and passport number (with minor outrage)

* NATO AWACS planes and the German Air Force will patrol the skies above Germany throughout the tournament maintaining an exclusion zone around the stadiums.

* 5,000 private security, 7,000 German army troops and 30,000 German police (luckily unarmed) are supplemented by volunteer groups; most notably the now militant "Die Hasselhoff, Die."

The Germans are being quite coy on the cost of all this, other than it's "less" than the $1 billion spent in the Athens Olympics. They actually seem more impressed with their new ball and the game's motto: "a time to make friends".

For me, the World Cup just wouldn't be the same without Henry "4-4-2" Kissinger, so for you nervous first-timers here's a snippet of his 2000 word coma-fest explaining the game - you should wake up around mid-July, well after the end of the tournament:

In eight groups of four, each team plays the others in its group. The top two teams of each group advance to a sudden-death round...Manipulating a ball by foot along a 110-yard-long field into an opposing goal requires skills analogous to ballet...This turns the game into a kind of geometry of finding uncovered open spaces from which to launch an unimpeded shot on the goal...The result was a kind of total football: whatever the assigned position of the player, he had the additional task of reinforcing the center of gravity, attack or defense, depending on the situation.

-- Steven Snell

World Cup: Time to Whoop Ass

I don't like football (read: soccer) any more than you do. But we can probably agree that the arrival of those lustful football fans on German soil for the World Cup is a good test for a multi-national security force.

A combination of Stella Artois, 30 degree heat and discussion about my native England's "chances" create a mental state capable of (and fit for) quite a lot of punishment. And it's not just the Germans that want a chance to beat the crap out of these morons.

13 Countries have queued for an opportunity to get on the action with about 80 uniformed British officers taking part in the largest joint police operation in European history. Its also worth noting the threats to this World Cup are roughly comparable to those in a modern battlefield - peaceful and violent demonstrators, far right/left wing groups, multi-ethnic /multi-religious group tensions and possible foreign terrorism will make affective security and policing a challenge.

Along with the usual surveillance equipment associated with modern sporting events, some of the 2006 World Cup technology includes:

* Fast Fingerprinting devices allowing German police to transmit identification data to be matched against archives stored in the central database of the German Federal Intelligence Service.

* Facial recognition CCTV in the stadiums will allow cameras to record biometric facial features of suspected hooligans which can be checked in real time against photos stored in the central database.

* RFID chips in more than 3 million tickets will include identification information that will be checked as holders pass through entrance gates. Those with the tickets have had to provide personal data such as name, address, nationality, and passport number (with minor outrage)

* NATO AWACS planes and the German Air Force will patrol the skies above Germany throughout the tournament maintaining an exclusion zone around the stadiums.

* 5,000 private security, 7,000 German army troops and 30,000 German police (luckily unarmed) are supplemented by volunteer groups; most notably the now militant "Die Hasselhoff, Die."

The Germans are being quite coy on the cost of all this, other than it's "less" than the $1 billion spent in the Athens Olympics. They actually seem more impressed with their new ball and the game's motto: "a time to make friends".

For me, the World Cup just wouldn't be the same without Henry "4-4-2" Kissinger, so for you nervous first-timers here's a snippet of his 2000 word coma-fest explaining the game - you should wake up around mid-July, well after the end of the tournament:

In eight groups of four, each team plays the others in its group. The top two teams of each group advance to a sudden-death round...Manipulating a ball by foot along a 110-yard-long field into an opposing goal requires skills analogous to ballet...This turns the game into a kind of geometry of finding uncovered open spaces from which to launch an unimpeded shot on the goal...The result was a kind of total football: whatever the assigned position of the player, he had the additional task of reinforcing the center of gravity, attack or defense, depending on the situation.

-- Steven Snell

Draft Patrick Fitzgerald?

Right now, military "prosecutions only happen when a commander decides to have them," writes Defense Tech pal Eric Umansky in today's Slate. "If an officer believes somebody under his command might have done wrong, then the commander can go after him and bring charges. Or not. It's all up to his discretion."

In light of the Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and other investigations, Umansky argues, "What we need is an independent prosecutor's office, a place where a Patrick Fitzgerald-type can hang his hat and go after wrongdoing wherever it may be in the chain of command."

What do you guys think? Is Eric on to something, or not?

UPDATE 06/13/06 07:32 AM: "Umanksy isn't necessarily wrong, but he isn't exactly right either," says John over at Op For.

It is true that commanders have exceptional power when it comes to the prosecution and punishment of their troops, but the way Umansky spins the story makes it sound like individual commanders are the end all/be all for military justice. In reality, the military legal system -from investigation to prosecution- is an incredibly complex, multi-layered entity, in which the unit commander is a single stone in the technicolored mosiac

Chicago Cops Crack Heads, Ride Scooters

Chicago cops have a well-deserved reputation for being the toughest guys in a tough town. But you've got to wonder how many heads they are going to have to crack to keep that reputation up, now that more and more officers are riding around the Windy City on Segway scooters.

The CPD is spending about a half-million dollars to buy up 100 scooters and parts. That's on top of the 50 Segways already in use at O'Hare and Midway airports, and around the lakefront.

Cops have become a key market for the scooter-maker, after the machines failed to catch on with the general public. Around the country, 125 law enforcement agencies now use Segways, the company claims.

In Los Angeles County... officers prize it because it allows them to stand a head taller than they would on foot, so they can see over crowds and cars and project a more prominent presence at events like the Rose Bowl parade.

The scooters, which travel as fast as 12.5 mph, also allow an officer on patrol to cover a much greater distance than on foot, and go indoors, onto elevators and other places bigger vehicles can't. Blair said the added efficiency allows a force to cut down on the number of patrol officers on each shift and recoup the Segway's cost in as quickly as a month.

Several bomb squads such as those in Ventura County, Calif., and Little Rock, Ark., use Segways to transport officers in bulky bombproof and hazardous-material suits that can weigh as much as 100 pounds. The Segway allows them to scoot in and out of a scene quickly, without having to waddle in on foot.

Last year, Segway came out with its i80 police model, which features a longer battery life, giving the scooter the an energy efficiency equivalent of 450 miles per hour gallon -- with no emissions. The machine also boasts "Reflective Trim [that] helps establish your presence and enhance officer visibility" and a "Comfort Mat [that] alleviates fatigue that can occur when standing for long periods." Not that Chicago cops get tired. Ever.

(Big ups: Gizmag)

Anybody Got a Decent Explanation...

... for this?

The Veterans Affairs Department learned about the theft of electronic data on 26.5 million veterans shortly after it occurred, on May 3, but waited two weeks before telling law enforcement agencies, officials said Tuesday.

The officials said investigators in the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were furious with the leaders of the veterans agency for initially trying to handle the loss of the data [possibly the largest data theft ever] s an internal problem through the agency's inspector general before coming forward.

Officials said the investigators in the Justice Department and F.B.I. had complained that the delay might have cost them clues to the whereabouts of the data, stored on computer disks that were stolen in a burglary on May 3 at the home of an agency employee in Maryland.

UPDATE 3:09 PM: This gets even better. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson "was not told about the missing data until the night of May 16, or 13 days after the discs containing the data were stolen in a burglary at the residence of a department employee who had taken them home without authorization... [T]he secretary called the Federal Bureau of Investigation once he learned of the theft."

UPDATE 4:40 PM: Axe has a killer piece for Military.com today on Iraq vets' struggle to adjust to post-war life.

Cell Phones Full of Clues

I've got a story in today's New York Times. Here's how it starts:

The case against Dan Kincaid was strong. A homeowner in northern Boise, Idaho, had identified Mr. Kincaid, 44, as the person who had broken into his suburban house. But eyewitness testimony isn't always rock solid, and Mr. Kincaid was refusing to talk. The police wanted more. So they searched Mr. Kincaid's BlackBerry e-mail-capable phone electronically, and found all the evidence they needed.

"Just trying to find a way out of this neighborhood without getting caught," Mr. Kincaid wrote to his girlfriend on Aug. 1, 2005, shortly after he had been spotted. "Dogs bark if I'm between or behind houses. ... "

"Cops know I have a blue shirt on," he continued. "I need to get out of here before they find me."

Faced with his e-mailed admission, Mr. Kincaid agreed to a deal with prosecutors over that crime and a string of others. In February, he pleaded guilty to five counts of grand theft, resisting arrest and burglary.

"We seized his phone," said Detective Jeff Dustin of the Boise Police Department, "and instead of a jump shot, this case is a slam dunk."

Cellphones are everywhere: 825 million were sold last year, according to the market research firm IDC. And the phones do more than just dial numbers. With expanded memories, increasingly sophisticated organizer tools and sharper cameras, they are playing ever larger roles in the lives of almost everyone — including criminals. Drug dealers, rapists and murderers across the country have been caught based, at least partly, on the electronic gadgets they carry around.

But extracting clues and leads from mobile electronics is no cakewalk. Unlike personal computers, 90 percent or more of which use the Windows operating system, cellphones rely on a confusing jumble of software that varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and even phone to phone. Data is often hidden or encrypted. And as long as a phone is connected to its cellular network, there is always a chance that its call histories and text messages will be erased, deliberately or otherwise.

Read the rest here.

Top G-Men: Terror Ignorance is Bliss

A few weeks back, I wrote about the seemingly unshakeable culture of technophobia at the FBI -- and how nearly a third of Bureau employees still don't have e-mail accounts, as a result.

But that's not the only bad habit that the G-Men are having trouble breaking. As Jeff Stein reports in his must-read CQ Weekly cover story, there's still a willful ignorance about terrorists and their methods -- even at the FBI's highest levels.

Now listen to the testimony of Gary M. Bald, the FBI’s top counterterrorism and counterintelligence official, in a legal deposition last year. Questioned under oath in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by an Arab- American FBI agent, Bald was asked whether he knew the difference between Sunni and Shia, the two strains of Islam at war with each other as much as with the United States.

Bald waved off the question. “You don’t need subject matter expertise,” he said. “The subject matter expertise is helpful, but it isn’t a prerequisite. It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in the counterterrorism [program].” In other words, he didn’t know the answer: that a 1,400-year-long schism over who should lead Islam, originating in fierce succession battles after the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D., is still being played out between nuclear aspirant and Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, not to mention the armed factions battling for control of U.S.-occupied Iraq. The religious passions that drive the different branches of the Islamic world — and the fervor that leads some to violence against the West — was not on his radar screen.

Nor could Bald, or other top FBI counterterrorism officials questioned last summer, explain the web of relationships of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization with other key fundamentalist figures and groups…

hat its techniques for recruiting informants change on the basis of a person’s ethnic background, culture or language, according to testimony by John E. Lewis, another top counterterrorism official at the bureau. “It doesn’t make any difference whether somebody’s from the Middle East or a white supremacist or from Australia,” Lewis said, meaning that Middle Eastern terrorists rat out their brethren for the same reason Klansmen do: for money, revenge and disenchantment with the cause.

That the FBI’s American recruits spoke the Klan’s language in Mississippi and understood its culture and politics was not seen as any kind of special advantage that’s being lost in the battle against foreign terrorists. Under further questioning, Lewis also admitted that he had no previous counterterrorism experience himself.

UPDATE 1:48 PM: "The salient fact is that, approaching five years after 9/11, we still do not have a domestic intelligence service that can collect effectively against the terrorist threat to the homeland or provide authoritative analysis of that threat," John Gannon, a former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence, told the Senate Judiciary Committee today. "It is not enough to say these things take time. It could not be clearer from the Intelligence Community’s experience over the past 25 years that it is extraordinarily difficult to blend the families of intelligence and law enforcement, and that the Bureau’s organizational bias toward the latter—for deep-seated historic reasons--is powerful and persistent."

Read more testimony here.

Federal Bureau of Luddites

Most of you have probably heard about the FBI's technology problems: The field offices that still aren't connected to the 'Net. The 8,000 employees who don't have fbi.gov e-mail addresses. The case management database that's straight out of the leisure suit era.

But what's not as widely known is why the bureau is so behind the times. The big culprit is FBI culture, it turns out. Until very recently, being computer-savvy hasn't been considered much of an asset in the FBI, and clues were something you kept to yourself.

My story in Slate explains. Check it out -- it's my first one for 'em.

UPDATE 6:03 PM: Slate is more of an essay-driven operation. So I didn't get to use some of the juicier quotes that I squeezed from folks in researching this story. Here are a few:

*"Compar[ing] with the FBI is like comparing the Neanderthal system of 'one bang club on cave mean yes, two mean no,' to the futuristic Star Trek vision of intergalactic communications that transcend time and distance. If Captain Kirk found himself in... the FBI headquarters building in D.C., he surely would tap the communicator on his chest with the comment 'Scotty, beam me up, there is no intelligent life in this rectangular cave.'"
-- former NSA officer

* "Guys would write their notes on legal pads, and lock them in a safe at night when they went home."
-- former FBI agent

* Every SAC [Special Agent in Charge of an FBI office] is his own king. And they don't like people from other divisions coming into their kingdoms... If I'm working on an L.A. case, and I've got leads in Chicago, the attitude is, 'Why Go?' Everyone gets tied in knots."
-- former FBI agent

* "Everything the Bureau has been talking about, they’ve had here for years... You can’t believe how far ahead they are here."
-- U.S. Strategic Command analyst, formerly with the FBI.

(And before you ask: Yeah, I talked to current agents, too. They just weren't as snarky as the exes.)

Jihadist Site: How to Beat the Polygraph

Everyone knows the polygraph is an inexact tool, at best. That includes Islamic extremists, too.

According to the lie detector skeptics over at AntiPolygraph.org, this article, published in a jihadist magazine and on an Al-Qaeda affiliated site, tells Islamic extremists how to beat the machine. So why does "the U.S. intelligence community continues to place great reliance on polygraphs in assessing the credibility of prisoners, agents, informers, and even its own employees?" AntiPolygraph asks.

...The control questions are a group of questions that the interrogator asks the mujahid and the answers to which are known by both parties. The interrogator presents these questions to the mujahid and asks him to answer them, and meanwhile, the device records what are considered the natural heart, blood pressure, breathing, and perspiration rates, which will be compared with those that will be recorded during the real interrogation questions. If the mujahid is upset during when answering the interrogation questions, these physiological rates will change, and that will be considered an indication that he is lying.

If you know this, my brother mujahid, then you know that the “control questions” are among the most important stages the mujahid undergoes during interrogation with this device, and he must know how to deal with them as will be explained shortly.

The first thing that must sink into the mujahid's head is that the aforementioned physiological changes can occur for reasons other than lying such as nervousness, anger, sadness, embarrassment, fear, relaxation, and so forth. Cold, headache, and constipation may also cause changes in them. All this greatly diminishes the importance of the test results.

And don't suppose that experts can tell the difference between changes caused by lying and changes caused by other factors: up to now this has not been proven.

In many tests, truth-tellers fail and liars pass. Some people may show symptoms – such as fear, for example – during the test, and so the device indicates that they are telling the truth [sic] even though they are honest. And many liars pass the test...

Researchers have been scrambling for years to build a better alternative to the standard polygraph. So far, the results haven't been particularly encouraging.

Jailhouse Tech in the Spotlight

Guys in jail can be pretty crafty, pretty creative. Get someone who's done real time talking, and, sooner or later, you'll hear stories about makeshift water heaters or MacGyvered-up toasters.

A couple of years ago, I was sent a book by "Angelo," a guy in jail who wrote a book detailing all the jury-rigged contraptions he found behind bars. Here's some of what I wrote about Prisoners Inventions in Wired News:

[The book] shows how inmates fashion dice from sugar water and toilet paper, dry bologna jerky on jail-house light fixtures, [and] turn hot sauce bottles into shower heads...

"This gives a glimpse into the everyday lives of the outrageous number of people we have in our prison system," said [Chicago-based art group] Temporary Services' Marc Fischer, who first started trading letters with Angelo in 1991. "And it's a celebration of the creativity that comes in response to their restrictive environment."

In the movies, "prisoners only create things to escape, get high or kill each other," Fischer notes.

Angelo's objects show a more banal, more human side of locked-down life: one where soda cans filled with rocks become crude alarm clocks and inmates cool their drinks in toilet bowls.

For a while, now, Temporary Services has been building the tools based on Angelo's diagrams, and showing 'em off in art galleries.

This month, they're back in Chicago, at the I-Space.

Then, in the Spring, the Prisoners' Inventions head to San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center. The show has 13 new drawings from Angelo.

Two of 'em I've linked here: one for a chess set made of soap (above, right), the other (left) for a little jury-rigged, jailhouse companion.

Hi-Tech Cop Moves Up

I'm not expecting a box of candy or anything. Or even a thank you note. It's just coincidence, of course, that a month after I profiled Ron Huberman – the ex-cop behind many of Chicago's high-tech crime fighting efforts – he gets appointed as Mayor Richard Daley's new chief of staff.

Huberman was brought in last Wednesday, "the same day that a central figure in a City Hall contracting scam was sentenced in federal court," the Chicago Tribune reports. "Huberman said that 'first and foremost' among Daley's marching orders is to 'help restore taxpayers' confidence in the integrity of city government.'"

Later Wednesday, Daley introduced Huberman to more than three dozen city department heads at a meeting where, to "stunned silence," the mayor "read them the riot act," according to a city official who was present.

Daley told them that Huberman "is going to look at your department and your performance; if you have a problem with that, you are out,'" the official recounted.

In his previous jobs in the police and emergency management departments, Huberman also looked for ways to shove the least productive through the door. CLEAR, Chicago's massive police database project, started out as a tool for fighting crime. Huberman wanted to turn it into pink-slip machine, according to Northwestern University professor Susan Hartnett, a longtime CPD watcher. By tracking cops' arrests and their hours, Huberman hoped to "get rid" of the Chicago police's "bottom third" -- the officers for whom "there's nothing you can do," she observes.

Huberman put it to me more judiciously, saying, "We want to save officers -- ID them when they're falling off the right course early in their career."

CLEAR's personnel suite won't be done for months, maybe years. The system may not even get built at all, without Huberman actively promoting it.

If there's a knock on Huberman, it's that when he's pushing his projects, he gets too caught up in the hype. "He sometimes sort of believes the future is the present," one colleague says.

Anyway, here's a bit more about Huberman -- parts of last month's Wired story that didn't make it into the final draft:

Huberman doesn't want to be here, peering in on perps from 15,000 feet away, staring at the shimmering video wall and the PC monitor banks. "Too clinical," Huberman says. He'd rather be out in the streets, where he spent four years as a beat cop and a gang specialist in Rogers Park. Huberman fell in love with police work, "the pleasure of locking up the bad guy – the justice of it all," from "day one" at the academy. (The fact that his Israeli-immigrant parents were mugged when he was six years old wasn't that much of an inspiration, he insists.)

On the beat, he was known as an eager over-achiever. When he discovered a double homicide, he did more than the frontline cop's duty to fill out the initial paperwork, and make the customary rounds; Huberman found the lead suspect's mom, and persuaded her to convince her son to turn himself in.

Even now, working seven-day weeks as the head of the city's Office of Emergency Management, Huberman still likes to go out on patrol, just for fun, once a month, with his old partner, Sgt. Greg Hoffman – an 11-year veteran who keeps a revolver on his hip and a can of chili in his desk drawer...

Ron Huberman has long been a believer in the transformative power of security, in "using the police department not just for law enforcement, but to promote social change," as University of Chicago professor Pastora Cafferty puts it. Back when he was a beat cop, Huberman studied under her, getting dual masters degrees in social work and management, while riding a squad car at night.

During a stint with a Washington law enforcement think tank in the late 90's, Huberman went home to his native Israel, and helped train West Bank cops. "For there to be peace, Palestinians had to learn to police themselves," he says.

For peace to break out on Chicago's streets, law-abiding citizens had to be given a sense that the cops had their backs – even when there wasn't a Crown Vic on the corner. That meant developing a system, like CLEAR, that could help the police figure out who the real crooks were. That meant putting silent, bulletproof sentries with flashing cobalt lights up on telephone poles, to let the bad guys know they weren't welcome any more. "This is about restoring a sense of order, about taking streets from the gangbangers," Huberman says.

D.I.Y. Detective

One of the cooler things about the Chicago police's big anti-crime database is that any beat cop can use it to track criminal patterns in his or her neighborhood -- something that only detectives could do a few years back. Now, with Google Maps and a slick little website called ChicagoCrime.org, citizens can get in on the act, too.

The site lets you search and map every crime in the Windy City, by beat, by date, by felony, or by site -- from alleyways to ATMs to abandoned buildings. The searches take a few seconds. And they come with a handy map of the infractions, so you know where to watch your neck.

The whole thing kinda reminds me of what CPD Commander Jim Keating told me a few months back about his database:

"Before, it would take six to eight months to develop a set of contacts in your district. And we had to rely on the detectives to put together the patterns," Keating says. "Now, it's click, click, click, and we have it all citywide... It slaps me in the face, how much information we have." (via Boing Boing)

A CHICAGO STORY

Over the winter, I spent a week and a half riding around with the police in the great city of Chicago. 2,250 spy cameras, 466,000 pieces of evidence, four suspected drug dealers, and one giant car chase later, the report I filed for Wired magazine on my trip is finally out. Here's how it starts.

On a warm afternoon on Chicago's West Side, a young African-American man leans against the wall of the One Stop Food and Liquor store at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Homan Street. His puffy black jacket is so oversize that the collar hangs halfway down his back. Thirty feet up, a camera mounted on a telephone pole swivels toward him.

Three miles away, in a bunkerlike, red granite building near Greektown, Ron Huberman watches the young man on a PC screen. "You see that guy?" asks Huberman, the 33-year-old chief of Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications. "He's pitching dope - you can tell. Fucker."

The corner of Chicago and Homan used to be a haven for dealers slinging heroin and rock cocaine, the heart of a gangbanger free-fire zone. In 2003, the Windy City had 598 homicides, making it the country's murder capital. Three of the killings happened within a couple-block radius from here.

"We've gotta figure out where's he keeping the goods," says Huberman, his voice breaking from a bout with the flu. "We're gonna go on the air" - call for a police car - "and bust him."

With a move of his mouse, Huberman pans to the right. We're looking down at a second man, in a beige coat. He has a brown paper bag in one hand and a wad of cash in the other. "He's involved," Huberman says, staring hard at the screen. No cop, even undercover, could ever get this close for this long. But the cameras - housed in checkerboard-patterned, 2-foot-tall boxes the police here call pods - can zoom in so tight I can see the wisps of a mustache. Huberman decides not to have his suspected dealers picked up; too much of an Enemy of the State move to pull with a reporter around, perhaps. But the footage will be stored for review by antinarcotics teams. "Now you see the power of what we're doing?" Huberman asks, still staring at the screen.

STOP! OR MY MONKEY WILL SHOOT!

"Can you imagine having your house searched and the cop who walks in with the Kevlar vest using the two-way radio is a monkey?" asks TalkLeft.

Officer Sean Truelove is spearheading the [Mesa Police] department's request to purchase and train a capuchin monkey, considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee. The department is seeking about $100,000 in federal grant money to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations...

Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

It has been a little over a year since Truelove filed a grant proposal with the U.S. Department of Defense under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he is still waiting for word.

SAMSPADE.COM

Would you be jealous if your spouse started smooching other people -- in an computer game?

"For some players of Second Life, a massive multi-player online role-playing game, such virtual infidelity is a step too far," the BBC says. "So to keep an eye on their loved ones, some spouses are paying real money to in-game detectives, to snoop on the character... used by their real world partner." (via Geek Press)

THERE'S MORE: Wagner James Au's original story, which inspired the BBC piece, is here. Clive has some thoughts on cybercheating, too.

AND MORE: The Washington Post has a long feature today on the Army's new breed of interactive training. "This is a sim of judgment calls. There is no right or wrong answer."

HIGH-TECH HOG-TIE

When handcuffs along won't do the trick, there's a new way for cops to restrain their uppity suspects, Slate tells us: "a high-tech hog-tie."

Park City, Utah's Safe Restraints, Inc.... touts its product — called "the Wrap" — as "the ultimate immobilization system." The Wrap consists of a shoulder harness, a binding for the ankles, and a blanket with straps that encircles and restrains the legs. The harness and the ankle strap attach to loops on the blanket with carabiners, which helps to keep captives from moving. The whole device comes in a handy black carrying case.

The manufacturer recommends using the Wrap on prisoners who are already facedown with their hands cuffed behind their back—the handcuffs then hook onto the shoulder harness. A properly wrapped prisoner will be stuck in a seated position, unable to run or kick. Some doctors argue that police use of conventional hog-tying—with the wrists and ankles tied together, and the prisoner lying on his or her stomach—can be dangerous; restraining prisoners in a seated position supposedly reduces the risk of suffocation.

Maybe that's what happened Sunday morning, when a man, supposedly secure in the Wrap, died after a 15 minute struggle with South San Francisco police.

"They're supposed to prevent someone from hurting themselves or one of the officers," San Mateo Police Sgt. Hugh Wilkins, who hasn't heard of anyone dying in one of the wraps. "They're always used to transport someone safely."

CRIME SCENES, TOUCHED UP

This page on the Toronto Crime Stoppers site is meant to be a help to the police -- "a series of crime scene photos in which victim(s) and perpetrator(s) have been digitally removed," notes Defense Tech pal Xeni Jardin. A batch of images, for example, that "once depicted acts of violent sexual abuse of a nine-year-old girl, [now] contain[s] only inanimate objects -- a sofa, a bed, a wall, a water fountain. They're published online with a public request that anyone who recognizes the site contact authorities."

But, in reality, they show just how fragile evidence can be in the age of digital cameras. If victims can be Photoshopped out of crime scene, who's to say a .45 can't be cut-and-pasted into a suspect's hand? Why couldn't a perp be airbrushed into an alibi?

I've got an article in an upcoming issue of Details magazine that tackles this topic. And here is a related story I wrote last summer for the Times.

CAR CHASES ZAPPED?

After spending the last week with the hardworking officers of the Chicago Police Department, I've learned that there are few pleasures in life that can top the raucous joy of the high speed car chase. So I'm hoping this Wired News article is wrong -- that there is no technology that could render hot pursuits obsolete.

James Tatoian, chief executive of Eureka Aerospace in Pasadena, California, is developing a system that uses microwave energy to interfere with microchips inside cars. Once the chip is overloaded with excessive current, the car ceases to function, and will gradually decelerate on its own, he said.

"If you put approximately 10 or 15 kilovolts per meter on a target for a few seconds, you should be able to bring it to a halt," Tatoian said.

Most cars built in the United States since 1982 have some type of on-board microprocessor. Today, the processors are advanced enough to control functions such as fuel injection and GPS equipment.

Eureka Aerospace's High Power Electromagnetic System consists of a series of wires arranged in a 5-foot-by-4-foot rectangular array. The interference is emitted in a conical shape outward from the device.

Tatoian said that while he is not the first to come up with the idea of using electromagnetic interference to stop cars, he has been able to reduce the size and power consumption of such a device so that it would be much more portable...

Eureka Aerospace hopes to have a working prototype that the sheriff's department can test by late summer... Cmdr. Sid Heal, who evaluates technology for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, said that after seeing a preliminary demonstration of the device last year, he was very enthusiastic about its prospects...

In current situations where police need to disable a car they are pursuing, sometimes the officers must resort to spike strips, which are designed to puncture the vehicle's tires. Heal said that with an electromagnetic interference system, a potentially dangerous outcome (such as loss of control from flat tires) could be avoided.

"The beautiful part of using the (microwave) energy is that it leaves the suspect in control of the car," he said. "He can steer, he can brake, he just can't accelerate... It's going to change law enforcement tactics."

Please God, no.

FBI SCRAPS NETWORK

The FBI is widely known to have the federal government's lamest computer network -- and that's saying something. After the 9/11 attacks, G-Men couldn't even search its records for "flight" and "schools" at the same time.

A much-ballyhooed fix for the creaky system, the Virtual Case File, has been in trouble for a long time. And now, things have gotten so bad that the bureau "is on the verge of scrapping major parts of [the] $170 million computer overhaul," the Times reports.

FBI officials said the bureau has contracted with a research company at a cost of $2 million to evaluate the problems in the project... and determine what if any parts can be salvaged. One idea under strong consideration is using off-the-shelf software instead of expensive customized features that have been developed in the last few years but already appear outdated.

Genius.

THERE'S MORE: This Washington Post piece rounds up reactions to the Virtual Case File's demise.

AND MORE: Waaaa!!! Waaaaa!!!! Waaa!!!! It's all the FBI's fault!

That the reaction, more or less, from SAIC, the company contracted to build the Virtual Case File.

“The FBI modernization effort involved a massive technological and cultural change, agency wide,” said Duane Andrews, SAIC chief operating officer. “Unfortunately, implementing this change on the Trilogy contract has been difficult to do without impacts to cost and schedule. To add to that complexity, in the time that SAIC has been working on the Trilogy project the FBI has had four different CIOs and fourteen different managers. Establishing and setting system requirements in this environment has been incredibly challenging.”

"MODERN" VICTIM FROM 19TH CENTURY

The Doe Network -- the group of online, amateur sleuths who've helped track down dozens of cold cases -- have contributed to the unravelling of another mystery. And this is one of their odder cases yet: a murder victim, thought to have been killed in the 1970's, turns out to have been dead for more than a century.

The skeleton, found with a hole in the skull, "is not a 'modern' homicide of a teenager," Kentucky state forensic anthropologist Dr. Emily Craig wrote to local officials in Jefferson County. "It is a disturbed grave, most likely from the mid or late 1800s."

"Craig's letter was forwarded from the coroner's office to Louisville Metro Police," the Courier-Journal notes, "where Lt. Mike Veto still had the packet on his desk yesterday afternoon. 'It was listed as an unsolved homicide, but it'll be changed now,' he said."

The remains were found on Labor Day 1988.

Four boys discovered them while digging in a spot where they played behind their homes in the Villa Ana subdivision off Dixie Highway...

Ron Howard, then a sergeant with the Jefferson County Police, recalled that he and his detectives worked the case.

"There was a human being, and we didn't know what circumstances led to the death and it could have been a homicide," Howard said yesterday. "You spend a lot of frustrating time because there's no direction to take so you go in all directions."

The case was cold when Craig pulled it; she wanted to review it after Todd Matthews, a volunteer with the Doe Network, which tries to identify remains, sent her a question about it. Matthews needed more information other than age, race and gender...

"The bones were discolored and deteriorated," Craig said. "They were much more than they should have been for a recent death."

The X-rays of hardware showed pins and nails. The nails did not look modern, she said...

As for the body... it was positioned as if it were in a coffin.

She explained the hole in the skull as typical bone deterioration. "The bones had simply deteriorated to the point the thin bones of the skull were gone," Craig said.

COP TROLLS L.A.P.D. COMPUTERS FOR CELEB INFO

"A Los Angeles police officer used department computers to access confidential law enforcement records of celebrities and sold the information to tabloids," the Associated Press reports. "Between 1994 and 2000 (Officer Kelly) Chrisman accessed computer files on such celebrities as Sharon Stone, Sean Penn, Meg Ryan, Kobe Bryant, O.J. Simpson, Larry King, Drew Barrymore, Cindy Crawford, and Halle Berry, according to internal Police Department documents."

Chrisman's lawyer, former Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden, said that the 13-year veteran never sold the information to anyone.

(via Politech)