UK police want breathalyser for PCs
COPPERS IN BRITAIN want people to sober up about the seriousness of E-crime and are even suggesting a breathalyser-style tool for computers that could detect the sour stench of criminal computing within seconds.
With more and more computers being snatched in criminal raids, Britain's police are being overwhelmed by the amounts of lab work needed to analyse the seized machines for evidence.
Now, the architect of the UK's Police Central E-crime Unit (PCeU), Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, says a digital 'breathalyser' could really help cut down on the coppers' workload, plugging into a suspect's machine and quickly picking up on illegal activity like credit card fraud or selling stolen goods online. McMurdie even envisages a scenario where the tool could retrieve all relevant evidence automatically as the plod stand idly by eating doughnuts.
"Do we need to seize five computers in a suspect's house or could we use a simple tool to preview on site and identify there's that one email we are looking for and we can then use that and interview the person now, rather then waiting six to 12 months for the evidence to come back to us?" gushed McMurdie.
Rather simplistically she went on, "For example, look at breathalysers - I am not a scientist, I could not do a chemical test on somebody when they are arrested for drink driving but I have a tool that tells me when to bring somebody in."
Far be it from us to point out the yawning gap in complexity between a simple chemical test for alcohol and a cutting edge, highly developed computer forensics tool the size of a USB stick, able to sift through masses of digital - and possibly encrypted - information intelligently within seconds. But what do we know? We're not scientists either.
Virtual breathalyser or not, McMurdie's £7 million PCeU should be up and running by the spring. The unit will apparently act as a co-ordination centre for all national investigations pertaining to online crime, and McMurdie is also keen to incorporate a "central forensic server", which digital forensic experts across Britain could log in to in order to solve crimes Sherlock-e-Holmes style.
Unsurprisingly for the big brother state the UK is becoming, McMurdie also admitted the UK police are in talks with the FBI and special US Computer Emergency Readiness Team units to learn more about the possibilities of remotely searching hard drives over the Internet. µ
L'Inq
Silicon.com
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"...remotely searching hard drives over the Internet".
Now that is an interesting possibility. Would it fall under the laws that make "breaking into" a computer a criminal offence? Or, in the increasingly familiar way as the UK makes the transition to a police state, is it taken for granted that anything the police do is OK, even if it is "technically" illegal?
i do most of my best work about half way through a bottle of vodka or jack daniels. does this mean i'm going to get Mr plod knocking on my door when i'm working on my own machine? how would this work? or does being drunk within detectability of a computer become an offence too?
The implementation could be an eprom chip, password protected, that contains the owners basic information.
Name, Address, Contact Number & date of *claimed* ownership; for desktops and the date is to record when the chip was programmed so if the PC is sold, the previous owner would reset the chip and the new owner would have it set. If its a desktop and it has in the address there is no harm.
For laptops, just a name, maybe even a service online so that all that is stored is a serial number which police can query against a database and find the owner.
Maybe something like this exists already and the Police are just being silly, I dunno but you ain't getting in my hard drive so easy coppers.
And nor can McMurdie.
Having had the experience of destroying data on a hard drive (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda), it takes a heck of a long time. Okay, reading is probably a bit faster than writing, but probably not by much when you're just streaming.
If Plod raids a house and finds five modern computers with anything like half-way decent hard-drives, he's going to be sat in the living room for a week just waiting for his tool to finish reading the disk!
Cheers,
Wol
...was not supposed to be an instruction manual on governance.
O_O
I am so glad I don't live in the UK anymore. The fact they're even talking about intrusive bullshit like this is frightening.
Oh. The Yavolees would be pleased to work on this "more to search" government cash cow. "Email me immediately and we’ll send in the cavalry", says Ballmer: "I’m joking...but I’m not."
The economic period we're in now is going to prove the questionable value of search... DRM is the future.
The powers you give me I will lay down when this crisis has be abated! Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen. PeU, we can have those punters in prism, in no time. Please take a chair and the Microsoft Surface to Surface stable, and we'll get straight down to the BSOD.
May I suggest a simple solution? Have a computer connect to the cop and sense if he 'feels' someone if guilty, if the led goes green that will then be taken as undeniable evidence and you get 2 years in prison.
I know it's very similar like how things are done now, but with this slight alteration you can point at a machine and say 'sorry but computers don't lie'.
Technically the thing can just sense skin resistance to see if the cop is calm and confident, and use that as evidence
In order to do what they are suggesting they need to do behavioural analysis, string analysis and so on and so forth.
This is very similar to what you need to do to bloc spam. So this is what I am suggesting. First they fix the spam issue and prove that their analysis work.