Security News
In a joint operation, European and British law enforcement agencies recently arrested hundreds of alleged drug dealers and other criminals after infiltrating into a global network of an encrypted chatting app that was used to plot drug deals, money laundering, extortions, and even murders. Dubbed EncroChat, the top-secret encrypted communication app comes pre-installed on a customized Android-based handset with GPS, camera, and microphone functionality removed for anonymity and security.
In May, police in France, assisted by the Netherlands' cops, infiltrated EncroChat's core network - and in mid-June the operator pulled the plug, having realised the game was up. The takedown of the network has been a poorly disguised secret, with Northern Irish suspects reportedly being arrested last week after data from EncroChat's servers was shared around European police forces.
Police said Thursday they had shut down an encrypted phone network used as a key tool by organised crime groups across Europe to plot assassination attempts and major drug deals. French and Dutch police said they hacked the EncroChat network so they could read millions of messages "Over the shoulders" of criminal suspects as they communicated, leading to more than 100 arrests.
A data breach has impacted Maine State Police's information sharing database for federal, state and local law enforcement officials, the agency confirmed late Friday. State police say they were notified on June 20 by Netsential that a data breach may have included information from the Maine Information and Analysis Center, or MIAC. The agency has contracted the Houston, Texas-based company, which provides web hosting services to hundreds of law enforcement and government agencies across the country, since 2017.
South Wales Police and the UK Home Office "Fundamentally disagree" that automated facial recognition software is as intrusive as collecting fingerprints or DNA, a barrister for the force told the Court of Appeal yesterday. Jason Beer QC, representing the South Wales Police also blamed the Information Commissioner's Office for "Dragging" the court into the topic of whether the police force's use of the creepy cameras complied with the Data Protection Act.
Police in Germany have arrested 32 people and detained 11 after nationwide raids targeting users of an illegal online platform, prosecutors in Frankfurt and Bamberg said Wednesday. More than 1,400 police were involved in the raids in 15 of Germany's 16 states and in neighbouring Austria and Poland on Tuesday, said prosecutors in Bamberg, in the southern state of Bavaria.
A trio of Republican senators on Tuesday proposed legislation that requires service providers and device makers in America to help the Feds bypass encryption when presented with a court-issued warrant. The law bill [PDF] is dubbed the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which uncharacteristically cannot be condensed into a pandering acronym.
A top judge told a barrister for the UK Information Commissioner's Office today that his legal arguments against police facial-recognition technology face "a great difficulty" as he wondered whether they were even relevant to the case. In plain English, Facenna was saying that South Wales Police's legal justification for deploying facial-recognition tech, as detailed yesterday, didn't comply with the Human Rights Act-guaranteed right to privacy - nor the Data Protection Act 2018 section, which states: "The processing of personal data for any of the law enforcement purposes is lawful only if and to the extent that it is based on law."
Twitter has permanently banned the account of Distributed Denial of Secrets after it posted links to stolen information belonging to hundreds of law enforcement organizations in the United States. Distributed Denial of Secrets, a WikiLeaks-style organization whose goal is the "Free transmission of data in the public interest," recently leaked roughly 270 GB of information on more than 200 police departments, fusion centers, the FBI and other law enforcement organizations.
Automated facial recognition use by British police forces breaches human rights laws, according to lawyers for a man whose face was scanned by the creepycam tech in Cardiff. Squires is barrister for one Ed Bridges, who, backed by human rights pressure group Liberty, wants to overturn a judicial review ruling from 2019 which failed to halt facial recognition tech use against him by South Wales Police.