Stander recalls the events:

“I used my iPad while I was on the plane. I was going to be late for my meeting and, in the rush of departing the plane, I forgot my iPad in a compartment in front of my seat”.

Upon realizing he forget the device, he contacted the airline to report the mishap and see if it was turned into lost and found.

Stander explains what he did next:

“I then decided to log on to my laptop and the iCloud service (which links Apple products with one another), and found that my iPad was still in the vicinity of the airport.”

He reported what he found back to airline officials who instructed hime to contact the authorities. Using the iCloud the police tracked the device and found the thieves who took it, a driver for an aircraft catering company and a janitor. The men were arrested.

Amnesty USA is reporting that Park Jeonggeun, a 24-year-old Socialist Party activist, was arrested for retweeting “long live Kim Jong-il” from North Korea’s official Twitter account. He is charged with helping “the enemy.”

Park, who claims that the re-tweet was meant to ridicule North Korea, has been in custody since January 11. He faces up to seven years in prison.

Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Director Sam Zarifi says that this is “a sad case of the South Korean authorities complete failure to understand sarcasm.”

“Imprisoning anyone for peaceful expression of their opinions violates international law but in this case, the charges against Park Jeonggeun are simply ludicrous and should be dropped immediately,” Zarifi said.

What’s even weirder is that the South Korean Socialist Party doesn’t even like or support North Korea. They frequently criticize the communist state for exploiting its labor force, outlawing trade unions and forcing people to work under harsh conditions.

“Park is a member of a party which openly criticizes North Korea but the absurd case against him is not an isolated one. For too long South Korean authorities have been using the National Security Law (NSL) to restrict basic freedoms and gag civil society in the name of national security,” Zarifi added.

Park told Amnesty International that his intention was “to lampoon North Korea’s leaders for a joke. I did it for fun.”

Park has a history of poking fun at North Korea. He changes their propaganda posters on Twitter to replace a smiling soldier’s face with his own sad face and change the gun to a bottle of whiskey.

He disagrees with North Korean communism, but he demands he be allowed to know and learn about their culture.

“The NSL has a chilling effect on freedom of expression in South Korea. It is used not to address threats to national security, but instead to intimidate people and limit their rights to free speech. It should be reformed in line with human rights law, and if the government cannot do this, it must be abolished,” Zarifi said.

Zarifi claims that South Korea continues to use the NSL to silence opponents of the country’s view towards North Korea. Numerous arrests have allegedly been made against people for “propagating or instigating a rebellion against the state.”

There are other investigations under way in the country against those who have posted materials related to North Korea, where the police have deemed the materials to be “enemy benefitting.”

UFC President Dana White has been embroiled in an online dispute with members of Anonymous after his organization expressed support for SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Many back-and-forth exchanges on Twitter and in the media between White and members of Anonymous took place. Supporters of both sides made statements and tweets.

Then came this Jan. 26 Tweet from Mike Rood, a Richmond, CA police officer, supporting White (his Twitter account has since been deleted):

Then, yesterday, all hell broke loose.

Anonymous re-tweeted Mr Rood’s comment, noting that his threat of violence was illegal.

Ahoy @Fan1UFC – well that’s just lovely. An OFFICER OF THE LAW threatening people with WEAPONS/DEADLY FORCE? Isn’t that um, a crime? ClASSy.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 31, 2012

They then called on their Twitter followers to call Officer Rood and his supervisor about his public statements.

Email or Call Sgt. Mike Rood, Richmond PD, Badge #116 about his threats – mrood@richmondpd.net | 510-965-4985 (via @AnonyOps)

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 31, 2012

And, they responded. The Richmond, CA Facebook page was flooded with comments about Rood. They were deleted, and have continued to be deleted. The page currently shows no activity since January 26.

The Facebook wall for the local newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, was also flooded with complaints about Mike Rood. those are still up to view.

Folks love to comment when he checks in and he encourages people to comment; the more they reach out, the more he can connect.

If your local police authorities used social media to interact with you, would you socialize or do you thinks it’s a bad idea completely?

CTV in Canada is reporting that a man was threatening to shoot police officers and that he had posted the threat on Facebook.

RCMP Const. Janice Schoepp says that a Facebook security officer contacted the FBI once they saw the threatening post. The FBI redirected the information to the mounties which led to the man’s arrest.

The posts were tracked to a house in St. Albert, which is just northwest of Edmonton. Schoeep says that the officers had to come up with a plan quickly.

What they learned is that the suspect was not at home, but had a wife and two children. The officers called the wife and had her leave the house. The two children were picked up at school.

After some negotiation, the man was taken into custody and charged with one count of uttering threats.

James Houtstra, a 32-year-old man, of St. Albert, has remained in custody and is scheduled to appear in court on January 30.

No details of the threats were released, but the Mounties confirmed that they contained threats to harm the police.

The most amazing part out of all of this is that not a day passed from when the posts were spotted and Houtstra being arrested. Schoepp believes that they received the information the same day the posts went up which allowed them to respond quickly to the threats.

This comes after the tragedy in 2005 where a gunman killed four Mounties in Mayerthorpe, Alberta.

“I think we take every threat where someone threatens to harm someone else seriously. Before Mayerthorpe and after, we’re always very careful about matters like this,” Schoepp said.

The lesson to be learned in all of this is to not make threats to police or other authority figures, especially on sites like Facebook where you can be tracked very easily.

On that note, let’s say that you are having a Sunday afternoon picnic with your child. The weather’s good, you’ve been running around and playing – but now it’s time for lunch. You open up the cooler, only to discover that you’ve left a couple of the sandwiches in the car. The car’s just a few yards away, so you quickly run to grab the sandwiches.

And in a split second, you look back to see that your child is gone. You catch a black sedan speeding away and you are barely able to catch the license plate. Because you caught that license plate, police are able to search a giant database of plate captures and track the movements of the kidnapper.

A classic question: What is more important, public safety or personal freedom? What are you willing to sacrifice? Let us know in the comments.

Ok, I know this whole scenario seems a little bit Without A Trace or Lifetime movie-esque, but the point is that police were able to use an ever-expanding database of data culled from license plate snapshots in order to generate real-time location information. That’s a reality, and it’s happening in our nation’s capital, among other places.

The Washington Post is reporting that police in D.C. are beefing up the area covered by license plate cameras. More than 250 cameras in D.C. and its suburbs are constantly hard at work, grabbing license plate numbers and sticking them into databases. The police aren’t exactly doing this quietly, but it’s being done with “virtually no public debate.”

The highest concentration of these plate readers in the entire nation exists in D.C. (one reader per square mile), so that means that District police are building the biggest location database based on license plates in the whole country.

Let’s take a brief look at these license plate readers.

First, these are apparently different types of cameras than the cameras cities have been affixing near stoplights and other places to catch people running red lights or speeding – the “here’s a ticket 2 weeks later in the mail” cameras.

These plate readers cost about $20,000 each and can snatch images of numbers and letters on cars traveling nearly 150 mph and across four lanes of traffic. These plate readers in D.C. take 1,800 images per minute, every one of which is stored in a database.

Basically, these plate readers have made it possible for police to track everyone’s movements as they move across the city.

These plate readers and the subsequent database of image captures has tipped the privacy concerns of some – notably the American Civil Liberties Union. One of their main concerns is naturally the privacy implications.

In the District, laws are in place that limit the amount of time that surveillance camera footage can be kept. The images must be dumped after 10 days, unless there is an actual investigatory reason to keep them. But right now, there is nothing keeping data from the plate readers from being stored for years.

The ACLU says that this database is storing the location data of innocent people. And they are right. The plate readers are casting an all-inclusive net, grabbing license plate numbers indiscriminately.

Clearly this technology is rapidly approaching the point where it could be used to reconstruct the entire movements of any individual vehicle. As we have argued in the context of GPS tracking that level of intrusion on private life is something that the police should not be able to engage in without a warrant.

Let’s think back to the slightly-stylized child abduction scene from the beginning of this article. Maybe that seems a bit far-fetched, but the reality of the situation is that the plate reader database has helped police. According to the D.C. police department, they make an arrest a day with the help of the plate readers. In a four month period this year, they also found 51 stolen cars.

And although our child abduction story above might seem unrealistic, the possibilities are there for the plate readers to help in truly significant ways. Police could track cars to and from murder scenes or use it to identify players in organized crime circles like sex trafficking – by logging which cars travel between certain locations.

But the fact that the technology is beneficial or could be beneficial in terms of law enforcement does not assuage concerns of a “surveillance society” becoming the norm in the U.S. It’s a classic argument that pits personal liberties against security and safety. Just how much of your freedom are you able to give up to feel safer? This is a crucial debate that we’ve seen play out most recently after 9/11 with the Patriot Act.

The ACLU channels Minority Report to discuss preemptive law enforcement:

Of course, if the police track all of us all the time, there is no doubt that will help to solve some crimes — just as it would no doubt help solve some crimes if they could read everybody’s e-mail and install cameras in everybody’s homes. But in a free society, we don’t let the police watch over us just because we might do something wrong. That is not the balance struck by our Constitution and is not the balance we should strike in our policymaking.

Obviously, the plate readers are a valuable tool for the police, and there are an abundance of situations where one could imagine the searchable database of plate captures to be extremely useful. But are those plate readers building up a database that’s just a little too full of innocent people’s location information for your liking?

If this kind of thing is to proliferate (both in D.C. and across the country), it is argued that it needs to see the light of day. Basically, society should have time to debate its merits and discuss their concerns. “The police should not be able to run out and buy a new technology and put it in place before anybody realizes what’s going on,” says Jay Stanley of the ACLU’s Privacy and Technology Program.

What do you think about the expansion of the plate reader technology? Do the benefits outweigh the privacy and personal freedom concerns? Or is this an example of big brother yielding too much power with the ability to catalog this data without warrants? Let us know in the comments.

And of course, the internet has decided that it’s perfect meme fodder.

The most indelible image from the video that went viral last week is definitely UC Davis Campus Police Lieutenant John Pike casually pepper spraying the protestors, who appear to be sitting on the ground in an absolutely peaceful manner. The few-second clip of the high-powered, red-orange spray covering the faces of the students has been played thousands of times across news outlets since last Friday.

If you somehow have yet to see the video, check it out below:

Now, the image of Lt. Pike spraying the students has spawned its own Tumblr blog, the aptly titled Pepper Spraying Cop.

Little did we know that Pepper Spraying Cop has cracked down on so many famous moments in history!! This Tumblr will help document the long pepper spraying arm of this officer of the law!

And it does just that – by inserting the pepper spraying cop into various films, works of art, and famous photographs from history. Here are some of my favorite images from the blog:

Pepper Spray Cop ruins Abbey Road shoot -

Pepper Spray Cop Grinches Cindy Lou Who:

Pepper Spray Cop at the dawn of creation:

Pepper Spray Cop makes immolation a little worse:

Reddit has joined in the Lt. Pike meme fun as well. Some pertinent street art has been spotted. Only the spray has been replaced by butterflies:

Before I could think “That’s going to be a really popular t-shirt design pretty soon,” someone on reddit already made himself the t-shirt.

Memes pop up sometimes even when the source is decidedly less than funny. But they have a way of keeping things alive, and once you become a popular meme, the memory of you or your actions takes a long time to fade.

But California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed the bill.

Here’s the veto message he sent back to the State Senate on Sunday:

I am returning Senate Bill 914 without my signature.

This measure would overturn a California Supreme Court decision that
held that police officers can lawfully search the cell phones of
people who they arrest.

The courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific
issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizures protections.

That California Supreme Court decision that Brown references is the People v. Diaz, a case ruled upon by the supreme state body in January of this year.

In that case, the suspect Diaz was arrested for selling ecstasy to an officer during an undercover drug bust. Upon his arrest, his cellphone was seized and put into evidence. During the interview of Diaz when he was back at the station, an officer looked through his text messages and found texts about the selling of ecstasy. Diaz, naturally, moved to suppress that evidence as a violation of his 4th Amendment rights.

The California Supreme Court upheld that the evidence would remain admissible, because the mobile device was found to be “property incidental to the person” instead of a “pathway to personal data.” That means that it doesn’t require a warrant to be perused.

The Supreme Court of the United States upheld this ruling when they declined to hear the case.

California Senate Bill 914 would have in effect overturned that court decision and made that type of mobile search illegal. Brown’s veto will allow it to stand.

Wired suggests that Brown’s decision in this case could be tied to political gain, in that it “shores up support with police unions,” one in particular that donated $38K to his campaign.

Senate Bill 914 was supported by big name organizations like the ACLU as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who asked Californians to take actions and petition the Governor to sign the bill. Here’s what they had to say about it:

Modern smartphones are a candid window into the intimate details of our lives carrying everything from text messages to emails, from webpages we’ve browsed to our real time location, from lists of contacts to photo albums. But under California law, an arresting officer can reach into your pocket, pull out your cell phone, and thumb through everything on it regardless of whether your phone has anything to do with the arrest itself.

SB 914 ensures that law enforcement officials can’t search your phone without a warrant. This law will also cover other forms of sensitive mobile devices, like tablets and organizers.

It doesn’t matter if you’re arrested at a street protest or pulled over for a traffic stop; the sensitive data on your mobile devices shouldn’t be subject to the idle curiosity of law enforcement officers.

The EFF paints a pretty frightening picture of what warrant-less mobile device searches could mean for the public. Just think about everything that a police officer has access to if they start browsing your iPhone – it’s not just your text messages.

It means emails, call history, location data as well as all your photos. Since most apps on smartphones keep you automatically logged in, that means that technically your Facebook and Twitter accounts would be open to a warrant-less search as well.

There’s no word on whether or not you are compelled to relinquish your passcode if your phone is passcode locked and if so, what the penalties would exist for refusal.

This surely feels like an unsettling path to be traveling down. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments.

Dubbed operation “Texas Takedown Thursday,” the group defaced the texaspolicechiefs.org and exposed the slew of private email communications between members of various state police departments.

Yesterday evening, Anonymous tweeted about their exploits, announcing the website defacement as well as linked to a release on the operation.

They give multiple reasons for the attack – first, as a retaliation for arrests of alleged Anonymous suspects all over the world. Second, “Chinga La Migra,” as they take issue with Texas law enforcment continuing to “harass immigrants and use border patrol operations as a cover for their backwards racist prejudice.” Also:

We are doing this in solidarity with the “Anonymous 16″ PayPal LOIC defendants,
accused LulzSec member Jake Davis “Topiary”, protesters arrested during #OpBart
actions, Bradley Manning, Stephen Watt, and other hackers and leakers worldwide.

A little later, they announced the pastebin leak of the alleged emails –

Lewd jokes? Check. Racist chain mails? Check. You lost your radio license? Lulz. Playing on the fears of voters? Check. But we already figured that.

Indeed, the massive leak does have some pretty interesting communcations. Take the very first email from the leak, one from Friendswood Chief of Police Robert Wieners:

Subject: Stupid Bitch

That stupid bitch who started that stolen car chase at Yale and 610 got what she deserved (I’ll bet she was fat and black too). Same with that pervert that got shot by the county. Fuck that guy, see ya. That all sounds like good police work to me. Those folks got the criminal cure. It’s guaranteed, they will never commit a crime again.

To be fair, the dump is huge and contains mostly innocuous communications. But there are some that stand out, like this anti-muslim chain letter or sorts –

Subject: 1,400 years of inbreeding among Muslims
Attachments:
View As Web Page
GUYS,
I DO BELIEVE THAT THIS GUY IS ONTO SOMETHING!!

JESS

Subj: 1,400 years of inbreeding among Muslims

Read the article and make up your own mind. JHB

Hi everyone, this very interesting one came in tonight maybe it explains some of why the radical Muslims act so unreasonably brutal. Are the fact true? Don’t know but if it is true that they have as a common practice of marrying first cousins, all kinds of problems can erupt. OK, I looked at all my “hoax sites” but couldn’t find anything. But, just typing “1,400 years of inbreeding among Muslims” on Google results in a large number of articles discussing this topic. Is Bryan Fischer for real? Yep, See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Fischer and other sites about him.
Doc <°)))><

Anyway, here's the article that came in:

I admit that I have not studied the Koran or Quroan or whatever it is, nor do I intend to !! I was subjected to enough of of their total nonsense as only a casual observer in their part of the world :( .... I only forward this for your reading pleasure and to add to our understanding of the Muslim world. Sharing my opinion that they need to stay in their own sandbox instead of trying to inflict their insane beliefs and religion upon civilized people. (Shucks, now they will call me an infidel)
..... JD

According to AnonymousIRC, the texaspolicechiefs.org site was defaced for over 3 hours before it was restored. Apparently, it was defaced again.

It looks like they have taken that last bit of advice, as this is what you see when you visit the site right now –

Back in August, Anonymous began their #FreeTopiary campaign after the alleged hacker was arrested in the Shetland Islands in correlation with hacks against Sony and British authorities.

The MORIS case from BI2 Technologies is an iPhone add-on that allows police officers to take a quick photo with the device’s camera and cross-check criminal records databases to find a matching entry. And that’s not all it does. According to the Wall Street Journal –

With the device, which attaches to an iPhone, an officer can snap a picture of a face from up to five feet away, or scan a person’s irises from up to six inches away, and do an immediate search to see if there is a match with a database of people with criminal records

The gadget also collects fingerprints. Until recently, this type of portable technology has mostly been limited to military uses, for instance to identify possible insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan.

As soon as September of this year, over 1,000 MORIS units are expected to arrive at over 40 different police organizations across the country.

They are about $3,000 a pop and will be available for Android OS in the future.

How will various police departments use the new MORIS device? Simply, identification. If officers arrest an individual for a crime, they can use the MORIS to quickly determine the suspect’s actual I.D. and criminal history.

Or, if police want to identify someone who isn’t carrying a valid photo I.D., viola!

Of course, this is bound to raise serious concerns about privacy and constitutional rights. Would the snapping of a photo for use on the MORIS constitute an illegal search if it was done without a warrant and without resonable suspicion? If not, how about the iris scan? Under what circumstances will officers be able to force compliance with that measure?

On the flip side, this tool could be wonderful for law-enforcement. Just imagine how many people are dishonest about their identity to police. What about wanted criminals who attempt to change their appearance to avoid capture? On site eye-scans would be a great tool in uncovering their deception.

Here’s a video of the device in action –

What do you think about the new tech? Let us know in the comments.