law enforcement

Microsoft said today it received 75,378 law enforcement requests worldwide last year for customer information, but disclosed "content" in only 2 percent of those cases.

Those are just a couple of the details laid out in Microsoft's "2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report," the first-ever such disclosure from the software giant.

The report covers all of Microsoft's major online services including Hotmail, Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, Microsoft Account, and Office 365. It separately discloses similar data from Skype.

In releasing the information about law enforcement requests, Microsoft follows the lead of online heavyweights … Read more

The U.S. has teamed up with nearly 50 countries around the world in an effort to curb child sexual abuse on the Internet.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and European Union Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom today announced a new initiative called the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online. A host of European Union countries have joined the effort. South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, and Nigeria are among the many non-EU countries that will participate in the alliance.

The alliance will make it easier for the participating countries to work together to identify instances of child sexual … Read more

People like to make statements about themselves.

Sometimes, they use words. Sometimes they dress themselves in a manner that, well, says something.

So if you saw a man with wires and gadgets strapped all over him, what statement do you think he'd be making? That he's a cool, original, quirky, gadgety dude? Or that he's about to wander into the local movie theater and bomb the place?

This was the dilemma faced by ordinary mortals in the Discover Mills Mall in Gwinnett County, Ga.

As WSB-TV describes it, 30-year-old Daniel Tudela wandered into the mall and headed … Read more

The cops are getting their geek on. Four days a week, a police officer ducks into the social media room at the Redwood City Police Department, launches a video chat application and stands by waiting for your call, just like those Time Life Books operators.

Located smack in the middle of the Valley, the police department is the first in the country to offer video chat on its Web site. Police Chief J.R. Gamez was clearly peacock-proud when we asked about his organization's tech know-how. The police department tweets city alerts to followers and posts updates on Facebook. … Read more

Wireless carriers say they received 1.3 million requests last year from law enforcement agencies for subscriber text messages, caller locations, and other information, reflecting a steady increase during the past five years.

Carriers' responses to a congressional inquiry, as reported by the New York Times, reveal that thousands of records were turned over on a daily basis in response to law enforcement emergencies, subpoenas, and other court orders.

Nine carriers supplied reports in response to the inquiry, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The number of requests addressed by the study -- the first time law enforcement'… Read more

A new report from Google shows a rise in government requests for user account data and content removal, including a request by one unnamed law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality--which the company refused.

The latest Google Transparency Report, released today, also shows historic traffic patterns on Google services via graphs with spikes and drops indicating outages that, in some cases, indicate attempts by governments to block access to Google or the Internet. For instance, all Google servers were inaccessible in Libya during the first six months of this year, as was YouTube in China.

But the … Read more

The power of self-incrimination is now at your fingertips, thanks to a new device out of the U.K. that can test for drugs in a person's system simply by taking a fingerprint.

The technology developed by Intelligent Fingerprinting, a spin-off company from the University of East Anglia in in Norwich, England, can simultaneously confirm a subject's identity and detect the presence of a number of drugs, including cocaine, cannabis, methadone, and nicotine.

The tip-off to the presence of drugs has less to do with the actual fingerprints, and more with the sweat that is secreted through the pores of the fingertips and then detected using dyed antibodies. Those antibodies are applied to the fingertips via gold nanoparticles on the device.

The antibodies stick to metabolites secreted through the pores when a person is under the influence. In other words, if a subject's fingerprint turns a bright, pretty color, it could mean an extended conversation with law enforcement.

The device, which is expected to be available this year, represents a significant advance for detecting whether a driver is under the influence, which usually requires more invasive testing and produces results that can often be easily tainted. The whole testing process can take as little as 15 minutes, which coincidentally is about the time required to concoct a story about your roommate's hilarious practical joke involving switching the baking soda with his stash.

(Via New Scientist)… Read more

No, there won't be an app for this.

If you're thrilled about Apple's iCloud announcement this week, don't drink to it yet. Apple has just updated its App Store Review Guidelines, in which it now explicitly bans the implementation of driving under the influence (DUI) checkpoints in apps for iOS-based devices.

Section 22.8 of the updated guidelines clearly states that "apps which contain DUI checkpoints that are not published by law enforcement agencies, or encourage and enable drunk driving, will be rejected."

This new development is likely Apple's response to the call … Read more

Facebook is expanding its efforts to fight child pornography using Microsoft technology, Redmond announced in a blog post yesterday.

The world's largest social network has joined the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's PhotoDNA program. The service, which was developed by Microsoft Research and Dartmouth College in 2009, uses image-matching technology to find known depictions of child pornography across the Web. Facebook plans to use the technology across its network to ensure child pornography is not circulating through the site.

Microsoft has been using PhotoDNA with great success since the service's development. According to the company, … Read more