Fitbit, pacemakers, key fob may snitch on you to the police

In this case, normal home technology caught a criminal in his likes.  From the Chicago Tribune:

The firefighter found Richard Dabate on the floor of his kitchen, where he had made a desperate 911 call minutes earlier, court records show. Bleeding and lashed to a chair with zip ties, the man moaned a chilling warning: "They're still in the house." 

Smoke hung in the air, and a trail of blood led to a darkened basement, as Connecticut State Police swarmed the large home in the Hartford suburbs two days before Christmas in 2015. 

Richard, 41, told authorities a masked intruder with a "Vin Diesel" voice killed his wife, Connie, in front of him and tortured him. Police combed the home and town of Ellington but found no suspect. 

With no witnesses other than Richard Dabate, detectives turned to the vast array of data and sensors that increasingly surround us. An important bit of evidence came from an unlikely source: the Fitbit tracking Connie's movements. 

Others from the home's smart alarm systems, Facebook, cellphones, email and a key fob allowed police to re-create a nearly minute-by-minute account of the morning that they said revealed Richard's story was an elaborately staged fiction. 

Undone by his data, Richard was charged with his wife's murder. He has pleaded not guilty. . . .

The rest of the article is available here. 

Man arrested because he "liked" the "most wanted" poster on Facebook

Apparently a Montana man didn't realize that his IP address allowed him to be tracked down after he liked the "most wanted" poster on Facebook:

A man featured on the Cascade County Crime Stoppers Facebook page as an April "most wanted" suspect and who apparently "liked" the Internet post appeared in court Monday on a $2,500 warrant.

Levi Charles Reardon, 23, was arrested Friday evening without incident, according to police records. The records indicate he had two warrants for his arrest.

Reardon made an initial court appearance for felony forgery (common scheme). His arraignment is scheduled for May 7. . . . .

Burglar accidentally leaves his iPhone in home, phone gets him caught

Police in the UK use a burglar's iPhone to find out who had committed the crime.  The iPhone even survived the fire that the burglar started.  Talk about incriminating information on the phone.  It also contained info on what the burglar wanted to steal.  From The Argus in Sussex:

A bungling burglar who set fire to a home after losing his mobile left behind key evidence of his name, address and what he planned to steal. 

Tony Bytheway, 40, was high on drugs when he stole thousands of pounds worth of jewellery, watches and laptops as residents were on holiday. 

After realising he had lost his phone during the raid, he set three fires in the hope of destroying evidence before making off in the owner’s Subaru Impreza. 

The McCormack family returned to find their Findon home destroyed and two family pets dead. 

They also discovered an iPhone with the culprit’s name and address, along with details of what he planned to loot, where it was being kept and his accomplices. 

He stole around 200 watches, including a handful of Rolexes, jewellery including a £5,000 diamond eternity ring, Mr McCormack’s grandfather’s war medals, and his daughter’s laptop with all her coursework on February 16, 2014. . . .

Technology helping you recover stolen items

While this product can be used for finding many items, in watching this video I was particularly struck by how it is can enlist all sorts of other people in helping you to find a stolen item.

Child's iPod helps track down her kidnappers

It seems that it would have been easy to stop the tracking down of the iPod, but fortunately, the kidnappers didn't understand that.  That said, one wonders whether the publicity on these cases will make it harder to catch future criminals.  From Fox News:

The story of a 12-year-old girl's kidnapping fuels concerns about the dangers of the Internet—even as it demonstrates how today's devices can come to the rescue, Ars Technica reports. 

The Baltimore-area girl, identified in court as Jane Doe, communicated with several men via Xbox Live and social media. Earlier this month, she went missing, and a few days later, Microsoft produced a chilling transcript from one of her conversations with another contact, in which she said she was "going to live with some guy." She typed: "Im scared he said he was gonna kidnap me." After she was found, she said she had been raped twice. 

Jane Doe's iPod Touch helped investigators track her down via what police called "digital forensics," officials said, as the Perry Hall Patch reports. Apple told authorities where the iPod had been used recently, including at a home in North Carolina. 

Further investigation there directed searchers to another home, where they found the girl a few days after she'd gone missing. Now, Victor Yanez Arroyo, 32, has been charged with kidnapping and rape, among other charges. . . .

"Find My iPhone" App helps find woman whose care tumbled hundreds of feet down an embankment

From SF Gate:

 28-year-old woman from Campbell whose car tumbled hundreds of feet down an embankment on Mount Hamilton east of San Jose was rescued and taken to a hospital Tuesday morning after she spent more than 12 hours stuck and injured, officials said. . . . 

On Monday afternoon, just after 2 p.m., Campbell police officers received a report from General Motors’ OnStar system saying there had been a rollover accident involving Melissa Vasquez’s Chevrolet Cruze in the area of White Oaks Road and Shelley Avenue in Campbell, said Capt. Gary Berg. . . . 

Officers spent two hours searching the area, Berg said. But the pegged location wasn’t right. Police had OnStar honk the car horn remotely, to no avail. A second strategy — having officers run sirens in different locations to see if they could be heard over the OnStar system — also failed. . . . 

Officers then contacted Vasquez’s cell company, which provided a location of her phone within a 7-mile radius of downtown San Jose, Berg said. Authorities were still unable to locate the car. Campbell police officers broadcast the vehicle’s description to all agencies in the county, he said. 

Then, just before 3 a.m. Tuesday, Campbell police officers received a missing person’s report from Vasquez’s stepmother, with whom she lives, officials said. She said she hadn’t heard from her. 

Officer Dave Cameron met with the stepmother and asked if Vasquez had Find My iPhone, an app that allows you to locate your misplaced iPhone using cell signals. The stepmother responded that Vasquez owned an iPad — but she didn’t know where it was. . . .

The officer was able to find the woman's iPad, guess her password, guess that she used the same password on her iPhone and they use the "Find My iPhone" app to figure our where she was.

“Amazingly, Officer Cameron was able to guess the correct password after only 3-4 tries using his knowledge of commonly used password combinations,” officials said.
The Find my iPhone app was also locked. But the same password opened it up. 

Cameron activated the “lost phone” feature and saw a map of the location of Vasquez’s iPhone — 14555 Mount Hamilton Rd. . . . 

Since Apple's "Activation Lock" debuted, thefts of iPhones has gone done even while thefts of Android phones has increased

More evidence that deterrence works.

Click on figures to make them larger.

It is possible that some of the thieves have switched from iPhones to Samsung devices.  Of course, it is possible that cell phone thefts were increasing generally and that the ability to lock the iPhones caused their thefts to decline.  From a report by the San Francisco District Attorney:

. . . In New York City, thefts of iPhones fell significantly after release of Apple’s Activation Lock.  In the first five months of 2014, just after Apple introduced Activation Lock, robberies and grandlarcenies from a person involving Apple products dropped, respectively, by 19 percent and 29 percent, compared to the same time period in the previous year. This is shown in the chart below. The decrease in Apple thefts far surpassed the overall decrease in robberies (-10%) and grand larcenies from a person (-18%). Perhaps most tellingly, both robberies and grand larcenies from a person involving a Samsung smartphone, another popular device, increased by over 40 percent compared to the first five months of 2013. 

Crime data from San Francisco and London show that the introduction of Activation Lock likewise corresponded with a decline in iPhone thefts and an increase in thefts of other devices in those cities as well. As reflected in the Chart below, iPhone robberies in San Francisco declined 38 percent, while robberies of Samsung devices increased 12 percent in the six months after Activation Lock compared to the six months prior to Activation Lock. In London, Apple thefts declined by 24 percent, while Samsung thefts increased by three percent in the same time period. . . . 

How to put an end to joy rides by parking valets: "New Corvette will record every move a valet driver makes"

This is one tempting car to drive.  But valets aren't going to be taking any joy rides with these Corvettes.  From the LA Times:

Attention valet drivers: Don’t get frisky with the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette -- big brother is watching. 

General Motors is offering next year’s model of the famous sport coupe with a data recorder that captures video, audio and driving data from the vehicle when switched into a special “Valet Mode.” 

The Vette’s owner can come back from dinner and check out if the valet was testing the sports car’s 3.8 second zero to 60 mph time. The car will have recorded data such as speed, engine RPM, which gears have been used and the highest level of g-force incurred on that joy ride to the parking garage. . . . 

A video of driving hanky panky will be captured by a high-definition camera, which records the driver’s point-of-view through the windshield. Audio of any other hanky panky will be caught by a microphone in the cabin. It all can be viewed or heard instantly on the Corvette’s 8-inch color touchscreen when the car is parked, or downloaded to a computer. . . .

How technology killed auto theft

Technology has made it very difficult to steal cars made after about 2000.  The old cars that can be stolen are not very valuable.  If it wasn't for old Hondas retaining some of their value, auto theft would be down even further.  From the New York Times:

. . . 1990, the city had 147,000 reported auto thefts, one for every 50 residents; last year, there were just 7,400, or one per 1,100. That’s a 96 percent drop in the rate of car theft. . . . 

The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car. 

Criminals generally have not been able to circumvent the technology or make counterfeit keys. “It’s very difficult; not just your average perpetrator on the street is going to be able to steal those cars,” said Capt. John Boller, who leads the New York Police Department’s auto crime division. Instead, criminals have stuck to stealing older cars. 

You can see this in the pattern of thefts of America’s most stolen car, the Honda Accord. About 54,000 Accords were stolen in 2013, 84 percent of them from model years 1997 or earlier, according to data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a trade group for auto insurers and lenders. Not coincidentally, Accords started to be sold with immobilizers in the 1998 model year. The Honda Civic, America’s second-most stolen car, shows a similar pattern before and after it got immobilizer technology for model year 2001. . . .

Making it hard to steal cars undoubtedly matters a lot, but the drop in auto theft from 1991 to 2000 or 2001 is much larger than the drop from 2000 or 2001 to 2012.  However, the percentage drop from 2001 to 2012 (46%) is somewhat greater than the drop from 1991 to 2000 (37%).

By contrast, larceny has continued to fall over that entire period, though the drop is very similar in the two periods (1991 to 2000 is 23% and 2001 to 2012 is 22%).  It at least raises the question whether most of this drop would have occurred anyway.

New advance let's us determine age of fingerprint within one or two days

This advance will be important against people who can claim that their fingerprints were left at another date.  From CBS News:

. . . A team of Dutch forensic scientists has discovered how to accurately date fingerprints to within one or two days of when they were left on an object, as long as they're no more than 15 days old, according to reports.
"Being able to date the prints means you can determine when a potential suspect was at the crime scene or which fingerprints are relevant for the investigation," Marcel de Puit, fingerprint researcher at the Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI), told French news agency AFP.
Fingerprint analysis has played a huge role in solving crimes for more than a century. It was first used in an American court to convict a killer in 1911.
Fingerprint ridges are believed to be unique to each person. Not even identical twins have the same patterns.
The prints left behind when a person's fingertips touch an object are composed of a complex mixture of bodily chemicals, and that apparently holds the key to the Dutch scientists' discovery.
"Some (chemicals) disappear over time and it's the relative proportions of these chemicals that allow us to date a fingerprint," said de Puit to AFP.
This may have huge implications for future criminal prosecutions.
Steve Tillmann is a retired deputy sheriff with more than 30 years of experience based in Covina, California. He is also an expert witness in forensic investigations.
He told CBS News he has faced questions about the freshness of fingerprints at least a dozen times. . . .

Errors made by license plate readers

With millions of license plate numbers being collected everyday, TechDirt has some examples of errors available here.

Shaming people for crimes: Websites showing people's mugshots

The cost of committing crime for certain people may have gone up.  Some people can't be shamed, but for others (and we can guess who that might be), the cost of committing crime just went up.  I am not saying that this is good, just discussing the potential impact.  From Fox News:

Jaclyn Lardie did what many do when looking for a job: she Googled her name to see what a prospective employer would find. The search results devastated her. 

At the top of the page was an old photo from a night she'd rather forget -- a college-era mugshot from an underage drinking bust. Lardie was never convicted and had put the incident behind her. But commercial mugshot websites pounced on her photo and published it online, demanding a fee to remove it. 

"I was hugely surprised. My heart sank," Lardie said. "I felt like I was being unfairly painted as a criminal." 

With no options, she paid the fee, only to see her mugshot pop up on another site. That's when she realized she couldn't win this battle. Profiting from shame is the business model for mugshot websites. 

"I personally believe it's a legalized form of blackmail," said Lardie, whose photo now resides on Mugshots.com under her maiden name. The website charges $399 for removal. . . .

Google Maps serve as the IRS's eye in the sky

From the Daily Caller:

. . . A redacted IRS letter dated Sept. 8, 2011 reveals that at least in one case the IRS’s examiners used photos of a property, obtained through Google Maps, as evidence to revoke the 501(c)(4) status of a homeowner’s association. 

“The road consists of a two-mile loop around the inside of the property. It goes not have any sidewalks or bicycle lanes. The examining agent printed and copied a map from Google Maps (www.google.com) into this report,”states the letter. . . .

Justice Alito anticipated where this technology is going in spying on people.

Justice Samuel Alito argued that this protection was insufficient, because the government could still spy on people from the air. While piloted aircraft are too expensive to use routinely, drones are not, or will not be. One might argue that if the police can observe and follow you in public without obtaining a search warrant, they should be able to do the same thing with drones. But when the cost of surveillance declines, more surveillance takes place.  . . . 

Apple's 'Find my Mac' app led to arrests in murder case

Apple's "Find my Mac" application was used to find a person who bought the stole Mac and the police then traced the Mac back to the persons who had originally stolen it.  From the Detroit Free Press:

. . . It had been more than two months since a popular University of Michigan medical student was shot to death, and police seemingly had few leads. 

But on Oct. 3 — 45 miles from where student Paul DeWolf was killed in his Ann Arbor fraternity — a man in Detroit attempted to log onto a computer he’d just purchased through Craigslist. The man didn’t know it, but the Mac laptop had been stolen from DeWolf’s next-door neighbor around the time he was killed. 

That computer had an app that would lead police directly to it, and to the two suspects now charged in DeWolf’s killing. . . . 

On Oct. 3, Apple was alerted that the stolen Apple Air computer was turned on, and its contents were erased. Police traced the computer to a home on Glynn Court in Detroit, and a man there said he got the computer from an Ypsilanti man through Craigslist. 

The new owner, a 30-year-old man who asked not to be identified, told the Free Press he’d suspected the laptop was stolen because when he connected to the Internet, the screen locked. But the man who sold him the computer tried to help him with the password, so, he said, he thought perhaps it was locked by an ex-girlfriend. 

Then the police showed up. 

“I knew it was something more than a stolen laptop since Ann Arbor police came all the way here,” he said. . . . 

Authorities took the computer and his cell phone, which he said he offered to help with the investigation. 

Police used it to identify the Ypsilanti man who sold the computer and learned that on July 25 — a day after DeWolf, 25, was discovered dead in his basement apartment — the Ypsilanti man bought the stolen computer from Jordan for $200. . . .

"DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’LL BE 285 DAYS FROM NOW AT 2 P.M.? THESE DATA-MASTERS DO"

This is pretty amazing stuff, but there is so much information available on you that it is possible to do a a good job predicting where you will be at some future date. From FastCompany.com:

Would you like to know how crowded your drive to the beach will be in three weeks? Or where your ex will be on a Friday night next month so that you can avoid him? 

Adam Sadilek, formerly of Microsoft, now a researcher at Google, and John Krumm, a principal researcher at Microsoft, were inspired by the question of predicting where people would be in the future and even led off with the query, “Where are you going to be 285 days from now at 2PM?” in their their paper, Far Out: Predicting Long-Term Human Mobility. . . .

3D printing of ammunition magazines threatens U.S. gun regulation plans

Unlike printing guns, which doesn't work, printing ammunition magazines doesn't face any practical problems.  Of course, people could always make the magazines using simple tools in any machine shop (after all they are just metal boxes with a spring), but my guess is that these 3D printers will capture attention in a way that the old machine shops didn't.  This article is from Metro News:

After the tragedies of Sandy Hook and Aurora, the U.S. government is preparing to introduce stricter guidelines on gun ownership. But supporters of the second amendment could get around them by printing their own firearms at home.
The technology is still developing but 2012 saw the first shots fired from guns with printed parts. ‘Gun hacking’ is a growth community in online forums and has become serious business.
“I have five people now making AK-47 magazines – they’re incredibly easy to reproduce”, Cody Wilson, CEO of the Defense Distributed company in Texas, told Metro. A firm believer in the right to bear arms, Wilson is deliberately producing parts for assault weapons likely to be banned by new controls.
“(U.S. Vice-President) Joe Biden’s group are using the assumption that if you control the channel you control the product – but that is not the case any more”, says Wilson. His company have made open-source code for over 30 gun parts available online, and claims they have been receiving thousands of downloads a day. . . .

As Peter K, the person who sent me the link to this information, noted these printing machines are everywhere: "my brother in law owns a couple of these type of machines for his jewelry business. you can make just about anything with them."

Three years in prison for stealing $800,000?: No wonder there is massive theft by TSA officials

Major airports with a history of significant theft problems.

There are only a few airports (San Francisco and Kansas City being the most prominent) with private screening, but those do not seem to have a problem with theft.  It would be nice to have a more careful comparison being made.

"iPad Video Chat Catches Massachusetts Murder"

I suppose that 20 years ago if the daughter and her boyfriend were on the telephone, the same thing would have happened, though the fact that the boyfriend actually saw some of the event makes the evidence even stronger.  From ABC News:

A Massachusetts man accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death as their daughter's friend watched via an iPad video chat is being held in jail without bond today.
Christopher Piantedosi, 39, allegedly showed up at the Burlington, Mass., home of his longtime girlfriend Kristen Pulisciano's on Thursday and got into a raging argument with her in the kitchen.
The couple's 15-year-old daughter was in her bedroom video chatting with a friend on her iPad. She heard the commotion and went to check on her parents, according to authorities.
The girl found her father holding a knife and her mother fled to the girl's bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
"The defendant then kicked in the door, threw the victim on the bed and began stabbing her with a butcher knife and it was visible to the daughter's friend," Middlesex assistant district attorney Nicole Allain said in court.
The daughter's male friend witnessed the attack on video. . . .

Something to think about including if you want to explain the changes in the number of robberies over time

Using electronic payments won't only reduce bank robberies, it should also reduce street robberies. But as this article points out, you will see more cybercrime (so-called substitution effects). It isn't just for underground economies that people like cash. They also like it sometimes to protect their privacy. From CBS News:

The Swedish Bankers' Association says the shrinkage of the cash economy is already making an impact in crime statistics.

The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.

"Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public," says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.

The prevalence of electronic transactions — and the digital trail they generate — also helps explain why Sweden has less of a problem with graft than countries with a stronger cash culture, such as Italy or Greece, says economics professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.

"If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities," says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.

In Italy — where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman — Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under euro1,000 ($1,300), down from euro2,500 before.

The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.

Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden's first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.

"One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time," he says. . . . .

Facebook helps solve another crime

From Fox NYC:

New York City detectives have used cutting-edge facial recognition software to capture a man suspected in a shooting at a barbershop.
The bullet grazed the 39-year-old man's head. He required stitches, but will survive.
Police say the man was beaten and shot on March 10 over a neighborhood dispute as he tried to get a haircut.
The victim knew the shooter but not his name, pulled up a Facebook photo and gave it to police. Authorities at the Real Time Crime Center fed the photo through the system and a match appeared: The suspect's prior mug shot. . . .
Authorities arrested the 37-year-old suspect about a day later . . . .

Thanks to Jeff Yager for the link.