On Q Professional Investigations

Lo-Jack for students?

That’s what a large Houston, Texas school district has tested in two of its schools this year and will make mandatory for all students in the coming weeks. The reason? Well, school officials say due to overcrowding they need to keep track of the whereabouts of students for safety reasons.

So how does this work? There would be a small microchip embedded into a card, which students would wear on a lanyard around their neck during school hours. The card emits a radio frequency picked up by scanners positioned throughout the school. This program isn’t void of protesting parents and students that feel it impedes on their constitutional rights. However, those parents may be in for a shock when they realize that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in the past that some freedoms enjoyed by those outside of school are restricted when a student is in school, mostly for the safety of the student body.

Should a school be allowed to put GPS tracking devices on its students? It certainly sounds like an invasion of privacy and the ACLU, of course, is weighing in on the issue. This Texas school and all schools for that matter have a responsibility to keep our children safe. Supporters have argued that many schools are overcrowded and a lot of shenanigans can happen, such as fights, kids skipping school and even abductions. A device such as this could help to solve student issues and perhaps save a life.

I think it’s a mistake to create a card that acts as the main identifying mark of student. The role of administrators is to operate the school safely and teach our youth. However, with such high salaries of superintendents, they might want to consider alternative concepts, such as taking a pay cut and hiring a few more security personnel to secure the premises rather than eliminate a person’s identity.

But hey, it’s only my opinion. What do you think?

Is Big Brother watching you?

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Can you spot a husband prone to infidelity? If he’s unhappy with his wife, he’ll cheat, right? Not necessarily. According to a Rutgers University study, 56 percent of men who have affairs claim to be happy in their marriages. They’re largely satisfied with all they have and aren’t looking for a way out, yet they still find themselves in bed with other women—and in hot water with their wives. Here, experts explain this phenomenon and dispel other popular cheating myths.

Fact #1: Most men are still in love with their wives when they cheat.

Men who cheat haven’t fallen out of love; they’ve become unsatisfied with the current state of it. “Cheating usually occurs in the phase of companionate love, when couples begin to settle down, have kids and solidify the life being built together,” says clinical psychologist Andra Brosh, PhD. While they’re fulfilled in some areas, like being a provider, the romance may be missing. “We more often think of women complaining about a lack of romance, but men feel it, too,” says Dr. Brosh. “They frequently suffer in silence, believing they can’t get what they want from their spouses.” To avoid this in your marriage, plan nights out together, set aside time for sex and discuss hopes and dreams—not just workdays and your son’s last soccer game.

Fact #2: Men usually cheat with women they know.

Cheaters don’t generally pick up random women in bars. “My first husband cheated on me with a childhood friend,” says Diane* from New York City. “His family was close to her family, so they never lost touch.” Intimacy expert Mary Jo Rapini explains, “A lot of women think that all cheating women are floozies—not true. The relationships are usually friendships first.” A good idea: Make sure your husband feels more connected to you than to his business partner. “Spouses go to work, take care of their kids and do separate things at night. That has to stop,” says Rapini. She suggests always going to bed at the same time and cuddling.

Fact #3: Men cheat to save their marriages

“Men love their spouses, but they don’t know how to fix their relationship problems, so they go outside their marriages to fill any holes,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Susan Mandel, PhD. Men want it all and have the skewed notion that another woman will make the longing for something more disappear. Then, they can live happily ever after with their wife—and their mistress—without confronting the real issues.

Fact #4: Men hate themselves after affairs.

You may think of cheaters as men without morals, but while they may like what they did, they tend to despise themselves after their indiscretions. “If he puts his ego to the side, he’ll feel like a piece of garbage,” says relationship expert Charles J. Orlando, author of The Problem with Women…Is Men. “After all, he’s betraying another human being who he claims to care about, so that takes its toll on every part of his psyche.” A cheater can feel as though he’s failed as a man

Fact #5: Cheaters often get friskier with their wives when affairs begin.

Just because a husband’s touchy-feely doesn’t mean his marriage is on firm footing. “When a man starts cheating, he becomes hyperactive sexually,” says Rapini, explaining that his sex drive has been awakened, and his wife is still the one with whom he feels most comfortable sexually. If you notice a sudden change in your husband’s sex drive, it should raise a red flag. Be on the lookout for the switch to flip off again. “After the affair is solid, he may begin to pull away,” says Rapini.

Fact #6: Women cheat just as much as men, and their affairs are often more dangerous.

An Indiana University study shows that men and women cheat at the same rate. But “the reasons the sexes cheat are different,” says Orlando. He explains women are more likely to cheat for emotional satisfaction. “Online cheating—without any physical contact—is the most damaging type of infidelity,” says Orlando. Becoming emotionally invested in another person means you’ve likely checked out of your marriage. But if it’s just sex, it’s less about attachment and more about a hurtful mistake.

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The traditional approach to video surveillance is to blanket a property with low-res VGA cameras to catch suspicious activities from any angle. But with Avigilon’s 29-megapixel JPEG2000 HD Pro, you can slap a wide angle Canon lens on the end and cover an entire parking lot in one fell swoop.

It might border on overkill, but there are good reasons for using a high-resolution security camera that can accept EF mount lenses. Besides ensuring images aren’t going to be obfuscated by a cheap lens, there’s sufficient detail to make out faces and even licence plate numbers from a fair distance. And a fast expensive lens can considerably boost a camera’s low-light performance. Although, you’d want to keep the f-stop in check to avoid a useless shallow depth of field.

Avigilon claims the camera provides the same amount of coverage as over 95 VGA resolution cameras, but that’s assuming they’d all be pointed in the same general area. It’s also limited to a frame rate of just two shots per second, but that’s a fair trade-off if it yields a clear shot of a perp that leads to an arrest.

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The prospect of sinking $200,000 into law school and changing your mind about being a lawyer might be terrifying.

But you can still use your degree.

Law graduates go on to plenty of lucrative and interesting non-lawyer jobs.

Some of these positions—like Congress—might be a longshot, but you’ll be surprised at what you can do with your law degree.

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Google has launched a new effort to warn its users that they could be the victims of cyberattacks from hostile governments.

Account-holders working in international relations, development and other sensitive areas have received messages from the search giant informing them of recent efforts to spy on their online history.

The move comes after the company started detecting ‘tens of thousands’ of new hacking attacks originating in the Middle East.

Google is a tempting target for hackers, as it is not focussed solely on search but also offers its users services such as email, mapping and Chrome, one of the most popular web browsers.

This week, according to the New York Times, users thought to have been targeted saw a message attached to their accounts saying, ‘Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer.’

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The widespread adoption of YouTube has proven to be an invaluable vehicle for police departments, who are posting video surveillance footage on YouTube to gain traction in solving crimes.

The reason is in the YouTube user statistics themselves: More than 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month; more than three billion hours of video are viewed per month, with more than one trillion hours viewed in 2011; nearly 100 million people take social action after viewing a video every week.

There are nearly 40 police departments posting surveillance video on YouTube, including Kansas City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston, Tucson, Milwaukee, Portland, and Minneapolis.

The Milwaukee Police Department is a use-case for this growing law enforcement trend. The department has harnessed YouTube as an outreach tool since 2008; and since that time, the department has also become entrenched in the social media realm. Milwaukee’s Police Department has generated an impressive following on Facebook and Twitter, and sees these channels as a way to create an ongoing dialogue with the public.

“It’s been very positive,” Anne Schwartz, director of communications at the Milwaukee Police Department, says of YouTube’s impact on her department. “Someone can watch a video on our website or on YouTube and read the entire description and pause it if they want to, and really take a good look at it. We’ve solved crimes that way. We’ve had people that see these videos, and then recognize the suspect in that video.”

The Philadelphia Police Department created a YouTube channel in May 2008, a month after Milwaukee did. The department shares videos of unsolved crimes from each police division, ranging from burglaries and robberies to assaults and abductions, which, as a whole, have had more than 1.8 million views. “We’ve released just over 250 videos on YouTube and now have around 90 arrests,” said PPD Social Media Community Manager Frank Domizio.

To protect the privacy of anyone who divulges information on a crime, comments are disabled on every video posted by the two police departments. Users are provided with a phone number and email to contact the police divisions if they know something or recognize someone. To avoid legal troubles, the faces of bystanders are often blurred so that only the perpetrators can be identified. “Every face is blurred, except the people that we’re looking for,” Domizio confirmed. “We make it our focus to ensure anonymity. We use a program called Camtasia to edit videos, which lets us blur faces or zoom in on suspects. Any innocent or non-involved person is blurred or edited out of the video.”

All footage posted by police departments comes directly from business and public cameras. “The videos that we post all happen in the public — either in a public place such as a street with outdoor cameras, or in a business where there is surveillance.”

Security cameras with HD resolution noticeably enhance the quality and clarity of the video, making it easier for viewers to discern the scene’s details, including license plate numbers and faces. Day/night cameras that see in extremely low-lit or completely dark environments are beneficial in the evening when crimes generally occur. When businesses invest in these technologies, police will have access to video with greater evidentiary value.

In the end, police realize how crucial it is to make surveillance video available to as many people as possible.YouTube has enabled them to do just that.

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A new version of a draft law that proposed to set up a national DNA fingerprint database of criminals, including rapists, murderers and kidnappers, plans to substantially expand the type of offenders it covers to include people convicted of drunk driving and adultery.

The expanded list covers a host of offences including violations of the Motor Vehicles Act and dowry deaths, according to the ‘work-in-progress’ version of the draft reviewed by Mint. Mint has independently confirmed the authenticity of this version of the proposed legislation.

The proposed Indian database, or the National DNA databank, as it will be called, will consolidate DNA profiles from several state-level databases and maintain at least six different lists—an offenders index (that includes undertrials), suspects index, missing persons index, a crime scene index, unknown deceased persons’ index and a volunteers index. Only those who have been convicted of a crime will have their DNA profile permanently on the database. Missing persons subsequently found or suspects cleared of an investigation will be removed from the list after a court orders the manager of a DNA database bank to do so.

While currently the government consolidates some biological information about convicts, including fingerprints, in a centralized database, a database of DNA information opens up several ethical issues around privacy.

DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid encodes information of a person’s genes. While analysing this can reveal information on a person’s medical history, parentage and propensity to diseases, forensic experts say DNA-related information collected from a crime scene is quite useless for gleaning a person’s medical history.

“There are 17 sites or locations along the DNA strand that, together, we use to identify a person,” said J. Gowrishankar, director, Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, and one of the scientists involved with the creation of the database. “However, none of these locations reveal anything about a person’s medical history. They are as neutral as fingerprints.”

He added that the chances of two people matching all 17 points are one in a 100 trillion. “That’s many times less than the world’s population, and hence a useful, neutral, unique identifier,” said Gowrishankar.

Apart from its uniqueness as an identifier, DNA can be accessed from a wide range of biological samples such as hair, semen, saliva, dead skin cells unlike fingerprints which are harder to find, according to Gowrishankar.

Yet embedded in its usefulness lies its potential propensity to invade a person’s privacy. Exactly 50% of one’s genetic information is shared with a parent or progeny, and between 25% and 90% with a sibling. Thus a convict’s DNA information on the database also points to DNA information of innocent relatives and family.

“That’s one of the big concerns that we are trying to address. If there’s a 90% match between two fingerprint samples, it tells you nothing about the relationship between two people,” said Gowrishankar. “A similar match between two DNA samples, however, is a potential lead. Would it then be ethical for us to share that information with investigating agencies?”

Then there’s the chance that innocent people who just happened to be in the vicinity of a crime find themselves on the database without their knowledge or consent. “Unfortunately, DNA evidence doesn’t say what time a person was present,” said Gowrishankar. Thus, technically, unless an investigation is closed or a case is solved, people can without their knowledge be on the ‘suspects’ list.

Helen Wallace of GeneWatch, a UK-based advocacy group that’s been critical of maintaining DNA databases, says that it is the potential for false leads—generated by such instances—that undermines the utility of a DNA database. “In the UK, for instance, there have been instances when police relied more on the DNA database rather than properly matching DNA from a crime scene, with suspects samples and that actually delayed the culprit from being apprehended,” said Wallace. “Moreover, even doubling the size of the DNA database hasn’t led to an increase in the number of convictions in the UK.”
Jeremy Gruber, President at the US-based Council for Responsible Genetics, said the Indian database was problematic because rather than crime-solving, it would be just be a Big Brother surveillance tool.

“No other country in the world mixes their law enforcement database with databases of innocent individuals in this way. Indeed, since very few crimes actually involve DNA, its collection for crimes for which DNA evidence isn’t relevant serves no safety purpose—it’s primary purpose is surveillance,” he said in an email.

The UK and the US have the largest such DNA databases in the world with roughly 3 million entries in each. A recent amendment to the UK’s Protection of Freedoms Act will lead to the deletion of at least a million profiles from the database, mainly on the grounds that these are profiles of innocents, said Wallace.

Unlike in many countries where DNA samples of suspects who are later found innocent are destroyed, the Indian database will maintain all physical samples indefinitely. “Our law is currently clear that body and tissue samples will be physically retained. We have to maintain that in case of a re-opened investigation,” said Gowrishankar.

Other officials, however, say that much debate is needed before the Bill is brought before the Union Cabinet, a prelude to being debated and passed by Parliament.

“For a while, it was with the home ministry, but now the department of biotechnology has been entrusted with the provisions of the Bill and now there have been some concerns—especially on privacy— by members of the Planning Commission,” said M.K. Bhan, secretary of the department of biotechnology.

The latest version of the Bill has been cleared by the law ministry although Gowrishankar, who’s part of the department of biotechnology panel drafting the Bill, added that he was unaware of the expanded list of crimes covered by the database.

“There’s a lot more discussion that’s needed on that,” he said.

An independent expert said that while she favours a national database, it would be useful and effective only if policemen and crime scene experts were sufficiently trained to properly collect and store DNA samples before they are submitted to laboratories for analysis.

“There have been so many instances where the police have requested me to analyse samples, but they’ve not followed even the basics of preserving biological samples,” said Anupama Raina, a forensics expert at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi. “If collection is improper, a DNA database would be ineffective.”

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If you aren’t careful, much of the tech you hold near and dear can be used against you. An app called PlaceRaider, for instance, can use your phone to build a full 3D map of your house, all without you suspecting a thing.

Developed by Robert Templeman at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indiana and a few buddies from Indiana University, PlaceRader hijacks your phone’s camera and takes a series of secret photographs, recording the time, and the phone’s orientation and location with each shot. Using that information, it can reliably build a 3D model of your home or office, and let cyber-intruders comb it for personal information like passwords on sticky notes, bank statements laying out on the coffee table, or anything else you might have lying around that could wind up the target of a raid on a later date.

You might be asking yourself “why not just take video?” There are a couple of reasons. For one, users looking for things to steal found the 3D environments to be very useful in early tests of the app. More importantly, using photos and stitching them together after transmission minimizes the amount of data the phone has to be able to send, making the whole thing especially surreptitious.

That malware app was developed on Android for practical purposes—presumably because the Android is a particularly open and tinker-friendly OS—but there’s no reason it couldn’t show up on other mobile operating systems. From there, it’s a just a matter of tricking the mark into installing an app which quietly asks for permission to control your camera, all the time. Now might be a good time to start thinking about smartphone lens caps.

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Just after 1 o’clock one August night, a man calmly walked up to a locked car parked on a downtown Chicago street and within seconds — without a key, without any force — was sitting in the passenger’s seat. If you witnessed it, you wouldn’t think anything of it. It was just a man getting into his car.

Except it wasn’t his car. It was someone else’s, but the man had easily broken in and could now steal whatever he wanted. Thieves, it seems, have figured out a way to unlock cars equipped with security systems, all without so much as breaking a window or even jimmying a lock. While they are not actually stealing automobiles yet, they are able to steal belongings found inside locked cars.

That car in Chicago belongs to Michael Shin, who thought he was losing his mind when his sedan was robbed. Shin, after all, had locked the car, but now his belongings had been stolen with no sign of forced entry.

“I kept thinking, ‘How did they gain access to my car if nothing was broken?’” he told ABC’s Chicago station WLS-TV.

Fortunately for Shin, the answer was right there on his home security video, so he got to see how the robber had done it.

“He walks past my car, the dome light comes on and he kind of stops in his tracks and walks right into the car,” Shin told WLS. “It’s mind-boggling how smart they are to build some sort of a device or an app or something that allows them to steal easily.”

It wasn’t only Shin’s car that was robbed — his neighbors’ were, too. Wireless signal experts think some car thieves have cracked security codes, so they are able to send the same unlock signal that an owner’s key transmitter uses.

“It’s quite possible that they already decrypted the code, they actually have the key of the car, so they can open it any time they want,” Yang Xu, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, told WLS.

That is what Chicago police believe too.

“We believe that this code-grabbing technology was utilized and we are looking into it and investigating,” the Chicago Police Department’s Andrew Schoeff told WLS.

The technology that keyless entry systems use has become much more complicated since 2010 and now changes the codes on a regular basis, but for systems that were built before then, it’s a different story. And that has left locksmiths like Bill Plasky feeling dumbfounded at how thieves are now exploiting outdated systems to open cars like Shin’s.

“Honestly,” said Plasky, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

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News of criminal suspects being identified by posts on Facebook and other social media sites isn’t all that unusual.

But a homeowner in Tega Cay, S.C., didn’t even know his house had been the site of an apparent trespass by partying teens, at a time when the entire family was away on vacation, until he spotted some photos online, NBC Charlotte reports.

After he came across the photos on Facebook, said the unidentified 39-year-old man, “I’m looking at them like, ‘Wait, this is my house!’” Although he said the seeming teenagers were “running around doing lewd things with funnels, throwing up in the sink, passed out on the kitchen floor,” they also apparently cleaned up afterward, so the family saw no sign of damage to alert them when then arrived home after their trip.

The man said he recognized the teens as classmates of his children, who were subsequently able to get some details about what had happened at their home around the time of the July 4 holiday by talking to some of their acquaintances, according to the article.

Using photo tagging information, Tega Cay police officers have made a list of suspects and are trying to reach their families.

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