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Informing Intelligence-Led Policing
Browsing All Posts filed under »Intelligence Gathering«
A New Hope…
Dave Aitel has graciously allowed us to run his commentaries before – see Hackers May Help Choose The Next US President and Aitel On Cyberwar. Dave is the founder and Chief [Security|technology|executive][1] Officer of Immunity, Inc, and runs the Daily Dave mailing list, where this article was originally published. It is re-published here with his kind permission. So […]
Banning Feds From DefCon Is Self Defeating. Here’s Why.
July 11, 2013 by Nick Selby
If you’re not familiar with DefCon, the hacker confab that has been meeting in Vegas for more than 20 years, you’re not paying attention to hacking. DefCon (and the accompanying conferences like BlackHat and BSides) makes Vegas the nerdiest place in the universe during July. You don’t want to use an ATM, connect to a […]
Big Ears, Little Ears: One article, three layers of blown secrecy, and how Edward Snowden proves my point
June 18, 2013 by Nick Selby
Today’s guest post is from Eric Olson, author of the Digital Water blog and a previous contributor to PLI. Well, I haven’t had much time to write here for quite a while, but the Edward Snowden affair – and more specifically this piece in the Guardian – were such a terrific display of the Digital […]
How We Learn What We Know, to Chart What We Know
April 29, 2013 by Nick Selby
I spent an enjoyable 20 minutes today speaking with Hilary Sargent, an OSINT rock-star who had to ask me what OSINT was. That’s not to say that she didn’t know – I’m sure she did. But when I told her that it was Open Source INTelligence, and further explained the difference, say, between that and […]
Boston Bombing Investigation: Intel Failure? No. Bad Expectation-Setting? Oh, yeah.
April 24, 2013 by Nick Selby
This is a long post. As either Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, Voltaire or my Uncle Sid said, I didn’t have time to make a shorter post. It ran today in CSO Magazine and will run in other outlets this week (though this version here has some footnotes). In a hurry? Here’s a summary: My conclusion is […]
Onity Hotel-Room Lock-Hacking Triviality Becomes an Issue In Texas
November 28, 2012 by Nick Selby
Last July at the Black Hat conference, security researcher Cody Brocious gave a well-attended and much-discussed presentation in which he responsibly, totally reasonably and helpfully demonstrated the complete fail that is the Onity hotel door lock system. Now, I have skin in this game – I stay in hotels. A lot. So much so that, […]
The Answer Is In Your Data. And It’s “No” Until You Ask.
November 15, 2012 by Nick Selby
This post covers some really basic stuff, but it’s fundamental to what we do, so I think it’s worth a review. You’ve probably heard of “big data”, which after “cloud” is the most over-used, God-awful buzz-phrase of the past couple of years. Basically, big data means aggregating and correlating very large sets of data and […]
Federal Court: Location Tracking via Cell-Phone Pinging is Kosher
August 15, 2012 by Nick Selby
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that police may track the signals eminating from wireless devices, such as cell phones, owned by a person. In United States v Skinner, the court found that a drug dealer whose position was being tracked by the DEA as he and his son […]
BigEye: Meta’s Superb Daily OSINT Roundup
June 1, 2012 by Nick Selby
There are lots of great compendia of OSINT out there for law enforcement, some of which we’ve mentioned in these pages before. One outstanding publication which has been around since 2006 is BigEye News Compilation, a free service from Meta Enterprises, LLC. Some of my favorite daily OSINT reads include the Daily Open Source Critical Infrastructure Report […]
Dave Aitel: Hackers May Help Choose The Next President of the United States
January 29, 2012 by Nick Selby
Dave Aitel is the founder and Chief [Security|technology|executive][1] Officer of Immunity, Inc, and runs the Daily Dave mailing list, where this article was originally published. It is re-published here with his kind permission. At age 18, Aitel started spending his summers working at the National Security Agency (NSA) while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; three years […]
Snapshot: Progressive and Privacy
November 16, 2011 by Nick Selby
Dragon NewsBytes pointed this morning to a piece about security researcher Trevor Eckhart, who discovered that Sprint and Verizon phones are running CarrierIQ, a piece of software which has the potential to track minute details about callers’ lives. This reminds me of the conversation Dave and I were having recently about the large swathes of […]
Criminal Hack versus FOIA request: The Showdown
September 10, 2011 by Nick Selby
It’s been a whirlwind week, and that’s pretty much all I have to say about that. The commercial data loss prevention firm IdentityFinder set its product to search through the 3GB dump of data that criminal hackers stole from Texas law enforcement agencies last week. IF published its findings on Wednesday, which were quoted in several media outlets. The IF […]
Police-Led Intelligence 
December 24, 2013 by Nick Selby
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