Archive for April, 2012

An undercover surveillance video shows former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick Sullivan Jr. delivering methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia to two men at an Aurora home on the day he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies.

The video capturing Sullivan’s activity was released to the public Wednesday, a day after he pleaded guilty to felony possession of methamphetamine and soliciting for prostitution.



Sullivan, 69, was sentenced to 30 days in jail, two years of probation and a $1,100 fine.

The video was taken Nov. 29, when Sullivan showed up at a home where two men, confidential police informants, were waiting for him to deliver drugs in exchange for sex.

When he arrived, he handed one of the men a T-shirt and a muscle shirt as a gift, the video shows.

Sullivan takes off his baseball cap and a vest, and he lies down on a bed.

“Is it OK if I get comfortable?” he asks the informant.

As Sullivan sprawls out across the bed, he watches pornography on a portable DVD player he brought with him.

Sullivan tells one of the informants that the DVD is one he will enjoy.

“It’s all young guys,” Sullivan says.

The informant takes drug paraphernalia and methamphetamine out of a bag and asks Sullivan whether he consumed any of it.

“No,” Sullivan says. “It’s a social issue; why smoke by yourself?”

After a few moments, deputies raid the bedroom and put handcuffs on Sullivan.

As he is being arrested, Sullivan tells a deputy he has a “bad leg” and asks him not to break it.

Deputy Attorney General Michael Dougherty, who prosecuted the case, said Sullivan used his position as a former sheriff to gain the confidence of gay men who were methamphetamine users and brought them gifts to manipulate them.

Sullivan is serving his sentence in the county jail that is named after him.

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Private Security Industry’s Expected Growth!

Relax and rejoice PI’s and Security Officers! The private security industry is one sector of the economy that is projected to benefit from both perception and reality. Private security is projected to grow more than 6 percent in 2012 – the largest increase in nine years, according to a 2010 IBIS World Industry Report on Security Services in the U.S. The same report shows that businesses are reevaluating where their recovered dollars should be spent and investing in better security. Although the overall mood in the United States is still sour due to the perceived state of the economy, at least according to 55 percent of responders to a recent Pew Research Center study, another source shows that businesses are actually beginning to rebound from the 2007-2009 recession.

According to the IBIS research, between the years 2010 and 2015, companies will increase their security budgets as business sentiment improves and more funds become available. Many businesses will increase the number of contracted security staff, as well as the number of hours that guards are on duty. The rise in demand is projected to cause industry revenue to increase by 4.9 percent per year to $32.85 billion at the end of 2015.

Although we have this projected estimation, like we said before, it depends on both perception and reality of the economy. The Pew study shows that Americans consider the economy in an even worse position than in 2008, when the nation was in the middle of the recession. At that time, only 34 percent of Americans saw the country’s economic future as bleak. Today, that number is up to 55 percent. This negative perception also drives the security business, causing Americans to take extra precautions against crimes of opportunity – those that are committed when people grow desperate as a result of their jobless, financial situation.

Another factor driving the security industry’s projected growth is the reduction of government jobs. According to the February jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one-fifth of the industries with the largest projected wage and salary employment declines are government agencies or municipalities. Existing public safety personnel, including local law enforcement, will go on the chopping block – leading to outsourcing.

In late February 2012, a government-owned and operated electricity company in Tennessee laid off61 percent of its uniformed police officers and replaced them with enhanced security technology and more contract security guards at its critical non-nuclear energy sites. This is just one example of public budgets feeling the squeeze and opening the door for private security, which generally provides more affordable protection than traditional law enforcement – with the added benefit of keeping the reduced number of traditional law enforcement officers on the streets, patrolling areas that are more impacted by serious crime.

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Facial-recognition platform Face.com could foil the plans of all those under-age kids looking to score some booze. Fake IDs might not fool anyone for much longer, because Face.com claims its new application programming interface (API) can be used to detect a person’s age by scanning a photo.

With its facial recognition system, Face.com has built two Facebook apps that can scan photos and tag them for you. The company also offers an API for developers to use its facial recognition technology in the apps they build.

Its latest update to the API can scan a photo and supposedly determine a person’s minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age. It might not be spot-on accurate, but it could get close enough to determine your age group.

“Instead of trying to define what makes a person young or old, we provide our algorithms with a ton of data and the system can reverse engineer what makes someone young or old,” Face.com chief executive Gil Hirsch told VentureBeat in an interview. ”We use the general structure of a face to determine age. As humans, our features are either heighten or soften depending on the age. Kids have round, soft faces and as we age, we have elongated faces.”

The algorithms also take wrinkles, facial smoothness, and other telling age signs into account to place each scanned face into a general age group. The accuracy, Hirsch told me, is determined by how old a person looks, not necessarily how old they actually are. The API also provides a confidence level on how well it could determine the age, based on image quality and how the person looks in photo, i.e. if they are turned to one side or are making a strange face.

“Adults are much harder to figure out [their age], especially celebrities. On average, humans are much better at detecting ages than machines,” said Hirsch.

The hope is to build the technology into apps that restrict or tailor content based on age. For example the API could be built into a Netflix app, scan a child’s face when they open the app, determine they’re too young to watch The Hangover, and block it. Or — and this is where the tech could get futuristic and creepy — a display with a camera could scan someone’s face when they walk into a store and deliver ads based on their age.

In addition to the age-detection feature, Face.com says it has updated its API with 30 percent better facial recognition accuracy and new recognition algorithms. The updates were announced Thursday and the API is available for any developer to use.

One developer has already used the API to build app called Age Meter, which is available in the Apple App Store. On its iTunes page, the entertainment-purposes-only app shows pictures of Justin Bieber and Barack Obama with approximate ages above their photos.

Other companies in this space include Cognitec, with its FaceVACS software development kit, and Bayometric, which offers FaceIt Face Recognition. Google has also developed facial-recognition technology for Android 4.0 and Apple applied for a facial recognition patent last year.

The technology behind scanning someone’s picture, or even their face, to figure out their age still needs to be developed for complete accuracy. But, the day when bouncers and liquor store cashiers can use an app to scan a fake ID’s holder’s face, determine that they are younger than the legal drinking age, and refuse to sell them wine coolers may not be too far off.

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The nightmare goes like this. In the future, the government will track your every step with miniature GPS devices, or worse, your own phone, turning it into a technological Judas. It will suck up oceans of your most personal data. Its cameras will capture you and its computers will catalog you. Phone companies and others will predict, package and sell your every move. Government eyes will be everywhere. The police will strip you naked at will. And at any moment, a predator drone will park a missile on your nose. Only Summer Glau can protect you.

Is the nightmare here? Maybe. Police departments are now asking phone companies to give them up-to-the-minute location information and other data linked to our cell phones, without a warrant. Phone companies are happy to comply, but not for nothing: They levy “surveillance fees,” essentially putting information for sale, including text messages, phone records, and “clones” of phones’ contents.

A recent decision, however, shows how resistant America’s courts are to this near-term dystopian future. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court held that the attachment of a GPS device onto a car to track its movements constitutes a search under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. The decision was unanimous but the reasoning was fractured; it’s already infamous for its Scalia-Alito colloquy comparing GPS devices to “very tiny constables” who, “with incredible fortitude and patience,” hitch a stealthy ride on your stagecoach.

In other words, slapping a GPS device under a car’s bumper isn’t the same as having an officer follow it around, because it’s much more effective and far, far easier.

In Jones, the Supreme Court agreed that 4th Amendment search and seizure protections govern the government’s use of GPS devices. The judges all agreed that the police should have gotten a valid warrant in that case, and so they agreed that the evidence collected from the GPS device should be thrown out. The judges disagreed, however, on why the government needed a warrant.

The majority opinion, written by Scalia, held that the government’s warrantless use of the GPS device on the car was a trespass on personal property. A concurrence, written by Alito, argued that the intrusion was a violation of personal privacy rights. Sotomayor positioned herself as the swing vote, filing her own concurrence, in which she essentially agreed that physical intrusions or privacy intrusions can be “constitutional” searches. She also argued, crucially, that cellphone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy that they not be tracked, and they information gathered about them by third parties not be given up.

What does this mean for covert cellphone tracking? Scalia’s view would require a physical trespass before finding that a “search” took place. With cellphone tracking, there isn’t an obvious trespass — just a request. The government doesn’t plant any item on your property, nor does it need to “seize” anything.

As Alito pointed out, technology is making tracking and surveillance possible without any physical intervention at all. In Alito’s view, the longterm monitoring of one’s car is a violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy. But when pressed, Alito sounded resigned:

[E]ven if the public does not welcome the diminution of privacy that new technology entails, they may eventually reconcile themselves to this development as inevitable.

Sotomayor wants both our property and privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment, and she’s not so sure that the “tradeoff” between technology and privacy is worthwhile — or inevitable. But she’s more or less alone.

Henry Kissinger famously said that “the illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little while longer.” Whether our police’s new comfort with warrantless phone tracking is legal, illegal, or unconstitutional may well depend on which of these rationales wins the future. In the meantime, keep a close eye on your iPhone. It’s probably watching you.

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The final three members of an 11-strong gang that scammed iTunes and Amazon out of £500,000 worth of royalty payments have been charged with fraud and money laundering by Southwark Crown Court.

Craig Anderson, Arran Jassi and Lamar Johnson all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud, after using three online music management companies to upload UK-produced urban music albums and tracks for sale on Apple iTunes and Amazon.com.

The principal organiser, Craig Anderson, then reportedly acquired thousands of compromised US and UK credit cards, which then used by a number of individuals to make over 500,000 online purchases of the music.

Anderson has been sentenced to 4 years 8 months imprisonment. Jassi and Johnson were both given 8 months, but Jassi’s sentence has been suspended.

The fraud, which was first identified by Apple in 2009, generated sales equivalent to that of a major recording artist, according to The Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) of the Metropolitan Police. The estimated loss to the victims, Apple and Amazon, is believed to be in the region of £1 million.

The investigation was first launched by the New York Police Department, but was passed to the PCeU when it became apparent that the operation was based in the UK. In total, 11 individuals have been convicted and sentenced to a total of 13 years, four months imprisonment.

“The nature of online commerce presents opportunities for sophisticated and resourceful cyber criminals, operating across national boundaries and jurisdictions,” said DC Simon Mills of the PceU.

“We hope the successful outcome of this and other PCeU investigations will serve as a deterrent to those contemplating these conspiracies, will put fear into the minds of those engaged in them and will serve to reduce the harm caused by cyber crime.”

The PCeU is a national unit created to respond to the most serious incidents of cyber crime in the UK, and forms part of the government’s response to cyber threats, under the National Cyber Security Programme.

Earlier this month, the unit arrested 14 people in connection with a phishing attack that robbed a British woman of her £1 million life savings.