When the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act (H.R. 3361) last summer, the future looked grim for the NSA’s mass data collection program. The bill would have gutted Section 215 of the Patriot Act, placing severe restrictions on the terms by which government agencies can use the law to collect evidence. But in the months following the proposed … [Read more...]
Social Media Monitoring: The New SIGINT
Last summer we reviewed leading social media monitoring tools used by law enforcement to track criminal elements and terrorists. At the time, the general consensus was that these apps -- while fine as far as open source intelligence (OSINT) goes -- took a back seat to more covert forms of surveillance. Many questioned whether monitoring “the Twitter firehose” held any value at … [Read more...]
Lawful Intercept Training – 8 Challenges and 1 Solution
At a recent surveillance trade show, C5IS was struck by the number of foreign law enforcement officers on hand for Lawful Intercept Training. Whole contingents of lawmen were on hand from Africa, the Middle East and Asia for vendor presentations on how to use solutions that ranged from active/passive devices to intrusive software, social media monitoring and beyond. Asked … [Read more...]
Law Enforcement and Tor: Can Anyone Peel Back the Layers?
Nearly a year and a half has passed since the Edward Snowden/NSA revelations prompted widespread interest in Tor and other methods of Web anonymity. Today, nearly 90 percent of Internet users rely on some form of encryption. That includes drug dealers, arms merchants and child pornographers who today openly hawk their wares on Tor without any fear of being identified, let alone … [Read more...]
Raytheon: Driving Big Data Evolution for Local Police
A look at Raytheon’s Big Data solutions for law enforcement agencies shows that local police definitely benefit from leveraging analytics to pursue criminal investigations -- particularly when they share data with other police departments. The most common use of Big Data is to conduct searches for available data on a target: to identify patterns, detect anomalies and … [Read more...]