On Q Professional Investigations

LOS ANGELES — An annual spring party in a Southern California beach town devolved into a riot last month when revelers turned violent, rocking cars, smashing windows and throwing rocks. Dozens were injured and about 50 people ended up in the hospital, including several police officers.

Today, as authorities seek help with the investigation in Isla Vista, they’re employing a new online and mobile app that designers say was created specifically for this type of situation.

“When the public really wants to catch these bad guys as badly as we do, this is the mechanism,” said Los Angeles Sheriff’s Cmdr. Scott Edson, who helped conceptualize the system in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. “They can help us by sending us pictures and video.”

The innovation, known as LEEDIR, the Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository, pairs an app with cloud storage to help police use smartphones as tools to gather evidence.

Proponents say the crowdsourcing system gives authorities a secure, central repository for the countless electronic tips that can come in during a crisis. And since it uses remote database servers that police access online, floods of data won’t cause system crashes or be expensive to store. Most agencies, Edson said, “don’t have lots of bandwidth lying around.”

Privacy advocates criticize the app as overly broad, saying it subjects innocent people to police scrutiny and probably won’t produce much good evidence. “There’s a reason that we pay professionals to work in police departments,” said Nate Cardozo, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“And there’s a reason we don’t crowdsource photo lineups and the like — crowds aren’t good at it,” he said.

Edson says he took note during the aftermath of the Boston attacks last year when authorities were inundated with videos and photos from people at the scene of the blasts. He figured a new tool could help streamline digital evidence gathering. “It seemed like the perfect opportunity to go to the private sector,” he said.

Edson connected with Culver City, California-based tech startup CitizenGlobal Inc. and Amazon Web Services to design the system as a public-private partnership offered free to authorities and members of the public.

“With tens of millions of smartphones in use in the U.S., it’s a virtual certainty that citizens will be taking videos and photos at any terrorist attack, large-scale emergency or natural disaster,” CitizenGlobal co-CEO George D. Crowley Jr. said in a statement when the system was announced in November.

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Some drivers would love to have a cellphone-free bubble around their cars, but when a Florida man allegedly created one every day on his commute, it didn’t necessarily make the highway a safer place.

Jason R. Humphreys of Seffner, Florida, operated a cellphone jammer in his Toyota Highlander sport-utility vehicle during his daily commute for as long as two years before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the local sheriff tracked him down, the FCC said on Tuesday. Now he’s facing $48,000 in fines, with 30 days to pay or file a response.

Humphreys told the FCC he used the jammer to keep people from talking on their cellphones while driving. Talking on a cellphone while driving is legal in Florida, even without a hands-free kit, though texting while driving is banned. Using a cellphone jammer is illegal for everyone but federal law enforcement, regardless of intent, according to the FCC.

Not only do jammers prevent consumers from making emergency calls, but they can disrupt critical communications by safety agencies, the FCC said. Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies confirmed that firsthand when they pulled Humphreys over. They said their two-way portable radios lost contact with the dispatcher as they got close to the SUV.

It was Metro PCS, the regional mobile operator now owned by T-Mobile USA, that tipped off the FCC that something seemed to be wrong on a stretch of Interstate 4 between Seffner and downtown Tampa about 12 miles away. On April 29, 2013, Metro PCS reported that its cell towers along the route had been experiencing interference during the morning and evening commutes. The FCC investigated with direction-finding techniques and found strong wideband emissions coming from a blue Highlander.

FCC agents and sheriff’s deputies pulled the SUV over, talked to Humphreys and searched the vehicle, where they found the jammer behind a seat cover on the backseat, the FCC said. Humphreys allegedly told the FCC he had been using the jammer during his commute for the past 16 to 24 months. Later testing found that the device could jam cell signals in three bands.

Humphreys is charged with unauthorized operation of a jammer, use of an illegal device and causing intentional interference. The FCC imposed the maximum fine for one violation of each, which adds up to $48,000. Because Humphreys used the jammer for so long, the fine could have been as high as $337,000, the FCC said.

Humphreys could not immediately be reached at a phone number listed for him and he did not return a message.

Despite some calls to legalize cellphone jammers in certain settings, the FCC takes a hard line on the devices, which are illegal to manufacture, sell or import in the U.S.

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