Definition of dragnet

1a : a net drawn along the bottom of a body of water

   b : a net used on the ground (as to capture small game)

2: a network of measures for apprehension (as of criminals)

In Hollywood movies, citizens have virtually no expectation of privacy and no practically no protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.  The movies typically depict cops routinely committing dozens of felonies in search of the criminal.  Given any cop movie, I can (and usually do) count more than a dozen felonies committed before the credits roll.  In some movies, the lead police character actually commit more crimes of more seriousness than the suspect they are chasing...

We must keep the Hollywood movie fantasy separate from reality otherwise we risk moving over the line.

Case in point: Blanket search warrants

http://www.wral.com/Raleigh-police-search-google-location-history/17377435/

 “The demands Raleigh police issued for Google data described a 17-acre area that included both homes and businesses. In the Efobi homicide case, the cordon included dozens of units in the Washington Terrace complex near St. Augustine's University.” http://www.wral.com/Raleigh-police-search-google-location-history/17377435/ 

Where a warrant is supposed to describe a specific person, place, or thing, going beyond that criteria is getting close to the line, if not clearly jumping over it.   Creating an analogy of searching a person/place/thing using high tech methods (non-invasive) and physically searching a person/place/thing (invasive) escapes most.  Few want a stranger, police officer or otherwise, to open their closets and toss items around, but when it comes to digital information, it seems that many people don’t have the same concerns over privacy and their protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"…Another review would further cull the list, which police would use to request user names, birth dates and other identifying information of the phones' owners….At the end of the day, this tactic unavoidably risks getting information about totally innocent people," Wessler said. "Location information is really revealing and private about people's habits and activities and what they're doing." http://www.wral.com/Raleigh-police-search-google-location-history/17377435/ 

Our data privacy problem resides partly in the service providers and partly with us, the users.   For example, to have the convenience in finding a specific type of restaurant based on your location, a service provider needs to know (1) your location, and (2) your desires.  The service provider stores each of your location way-points and all of your typed desires. They keep this information well past your immediate use of the service.  Your consent is key to making this data fair game to advertisers, spammers, criminals, and the government today and into your foreseeable lifetime and after death.

The difference between your home being searched by the government and your data being searched by the government is that when it is your data stored by a service provider, you are not generally aware that it is going on.  It doesn’t feel invasive because it happens without you seeing it.  You don’t see an investigator reading details about your life and would not expect it happen anyway.   

For investigators, it is so much easier to search the private data of every citizen in an entire city than it is to physically go house-to-house and physically search the homes.  By the way, if there comes a day where we see blanket warrants to search house-to-house, we probably are not having a good day.  But that is what happens to our personal data.

My hope is that law enforcement doesn’t lose the ability to use high-tech methods because of an over-reaching search warrant, but I know that this is what invariably happens because the easy way is going to be chosen by someone when they should have chosen the more reasonable way.

I’m curious to see where the fine line will be drawn in using dragnets to obtain everything to search for a specific something.

I’m big on privacy, even though I know that practically, the only information that is private today is that which (1) only you know and (2) does not exist anywhere outside your head.  Everything else can be had one way or another, by hook or crook.  Most personal information we willingly give away, such as our date of birth when signing up for “free” online services.  Other personal information we are required to give in order to abide by laws, such as applying for a driver’s license.                         

I’m also big on de-anonymizing criminals.   Supporting privacy efforts while at the same supporting de-anonymization efforts is contradictory, but realty. If you have ever been a victim of a crime where the criminal got away with it, you probably feel the same.  Both aspects contradict each other, where I want to have individual privacy but at the same time, I want to be able to de-anonymize someone who is committing crimes facilitated with technology.  What a dilemma...

I tend to focus on de-anonymization of criminals more since we are on a never-ending trend of breaches, hacks, and theft of personal information, let alone crimes against persons using technology. Two of my books were solely focused on the topic.  During presentations on the subject, I have regularly been questioned on “How do I…” in this case or that case from investigators* looking for the magic bullet.  Given just a 15 second brief of an investigation that has been ongoing for months, my typical answer is – the answer is there, you just have to find it. 

Secret Tip: there is no magic bullet until there is one.

The magic bullet in almost every case is a mistake made by the suspect.  An oversight.  An error.  A bad decision.  Or just plain ignorance.  All on the part of the suspect.  But a mistake by itself is not enough to crack a case.  You, the investigator or the analyst, need to catch that mistake.  You have to look for it constantly.  You have to expect to find where the suspect made the error because if you don’t have the intention to find the criminal’s mistakes, you will not find them.  That is when you find the magic bullet to solve your case, by looking for it and not hoping it drops in your lap.

When you do find the break in an analysis or investigation, everything becomes clear and appears to be such an easy thing that you wonder why you didn’t think of it before.  The fact is, finding the errors is not always simple or easy.  The little mistakes are usually hidden in tons of data and easily overlooked.  Sometimes the answer is plain view and no one sees it. Even when you find the suspect’s mistake, if you do not recognize it for what it is, you will quickly pass it and keep looking without realizing you could have solved your case a few minutes prior.

The steps in finding these mistakes made suspects are:

If you don’t have #1 above, then #2 and #3 won’t matter since you won’t be able to identify the evidence or clues you need.  The first things I do in any case is determine the goal or goals. Sometimes the goal is either dictated by someone else or it is obvious.  If the goal is not dictated or obvious, you have to identify the goal or again, step #1 is useless which renders #2 and #3 just as useless.

When you work with these 3 steps, the 6-Ws naturally come up in the case (the 6-Ws: who, what, when, where, how, why).  You need the above 3 steps as your foundation to actually work a case in order to get to the 6 Ws.  Focus on the 3 and the world is yours.  A tip: not everyone does this.  Many many examiners/investigators/analysts simply collect data without reason other than to collect data with the hope the case solves itself.  Don't be that person.

When I was a new investigator, it seemed that every case I received was like Groundhog Day.  No case was like the last, no evidence was consistent among the cases, and the goals were sporadic (other than “find the bad guy”).  Basically, every day I was starting over as new in each assigned case. In time, I learned a few things from experienced investigators, other things I learned the hard way.   In more than one case, I would be given a hint or a tip that would put me on a path to close a case.  A question as simple as, “Did you try this?” or “Did you look here?” was all I needed to plow ahead.  Sometimes, i would figure out an easy way or more effective means of gathering information and intelligence.  Many training courses focus on the technical means, but not the thinking part.  It's nice to know how to recover deleted event logs, but why? If you don't know why you should do it, you won't get anything out of it because you won't see the clues.

In cases with electronic media, the process is the same as in any investigation you have, whether it is a criminal or civil case (or even an internal corporate matter).  Define the goal so you know what to look for, know where to look, and figure out how to look for it.  Apply this to every case and incident you have and your case closure rates will be much better with less work.

For example, a case involving an unidentified cyber-criminal who is ‘hiding behind the keyboard’ clearly means that the what is anything that ties directly to the criminal.  The specifics of the what is important. The where depends on what you have to work with.  Perhaps you have an email, or network traffic, or maybe even physical media.  Somewhere in that data is the where and you need to know in what part of that data you should be looking.  The how is maybe the easiest part.  Maybe you need to look at metadata, or reverse engineer a file, or simply recover a deleted file.  That’s the manual labor part.  You need to work the brain part first, otherwise the labor will be for nothing.  

Recent cases in the news have shown that this method of investigation works on the most difficult of cases.  I must stress that when you see that a major case was solved by the simple piece of evidence of identifying an email address, that this is not so simple.  Every case has at least one error that was made by the suspect, and to discount looking for that mistake is a mistake on your part.

Any case where the article states that, “Oh, the case was easily solved because the suspect forget his email was in the code” seriously discounts the effort of the investigator who took the time to know what to look for, where to look for it, and how to look for it.  Cold cases are solved the very same way.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

This is what I have been teaching for almost 20 years now.  I believe that anyone from any place in any job with any education level can be a superb investigator.   I have met young investigators from small towns who can run circles around someone with 10 times their experience and education in the largest agencies because they apply the foundation principles of what it takes to solve a case.  Once they learn the how of digital forensics, they are just as effective in the digital world as if they were working a street corner robbery.  It’s not a diploma, or a certificate, or a coin in your pocket that makes you good.  You make yourself good.  If you happen to collect some tokens along the way, add them to a shadow box, but bragging about having certs has no weight if you can't work a case.

Another benefit of getting the investigative skills down is that you can apply it to other areas and other types of cases.  If you have the desire and can finesse the skill, you can run with the big dogs in working any type of case.  I truly mean that in every sense.  My first investigator duties, after being a patrol officer, was a narcotics detective.  I used the skills learned in narcs to solve murders, uncover and disrupt organized crime groups, identify terrorists, and work all types of crimes involving technology.   

Be prepared that when you start solving cases by finding the “easy” things, that those around you will call you names, like lucky or you only solved the case because of a suspect's mistake. Just smile and carry on.  After enough cases, you won’t be called lucky anymore; you will be called good and that is the goal: be good at what you do. 

* I use the term “investigator” to apply to anyone who has the job to find information, curate into intelligence, on which assumptions, conclusions, and judgments can be made.  That means a police detective, federal agent, incident responder, or forensic examiner.

One interesting investigation I had was that of a murder-for-hire in one city that the suspect used a Google search to find the victim’s home address in another city.  Simple enough crime to plan.  Google the name, find the address, do the hit.  Except in this particular case, although the suspect Googled the correct name, there were two people with the same name in the same city and he picked the wrong one.  I called this case my “Sarah Connor” case.

Fortunately, we intercepted the hit before it happened and prevented a random murder on the wrong person (as well as preventing the murder of the ‘right’ person).  In a basic sense, the suspect used the technology of one of the most advanced computer systems in the world (Google….) to attempt a murder only to choose the wrong name in a Google search hit.  This type of criminal incompetence and carelessness is commonplace.  It is also the way that most get caught. 

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Hollywood’s version of high tech crime fighting.  Minority Report with Tom Cruise showed us that not only can crimes be solved with technology, but that crimes can also be prevented with technology.  As for the technology used in the movie, it could have only been more accurate had a predictive analysis computer system been used in place of the fortune-telling humans (“Precogs”) in a big bathtub.

In a turn-key surveillance system, no person is anonymous.  Whether it is a private business or government agency, no one is immune from potentially being watched, tracked, or reported.  Private businesses use facial recognition for both improving customer service by detecting your mood through facial expressions as well as preventing crime.

“…faces of individuals caught on camera are converted into a biometric template and cross-referenced with a database for a possible match with past shoplifters or known criminals.” https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/03/revealed-facial-recognition-software-infiltrating-cities-saks-toronto  

Criminals who try to avoid using technology are severely limited on the type of crimes they can commit.  That’s a good thing.  A drug dealer without a cell phone is like a taxi cab driver without a taxi.  It is part of the business and can be tracked, traced, monitored, intercepted, and forensically examined.  Technology is a natural and required part of any criminal’s operations.  Criminals not using technology are ineffective as criminals, for the most part.

Criminals who try to avoid surveillance technology in public, such as license plate readers and facial recognition are also extremely limited in the crimes they can commit since they would have to remain in their homes to commit crimes outside of public surveillance methods.  Even then, committing a crime in a home is not without the risk of being monitored, either by a government agency, a private corporation, or an electronic device plugged into an outlet.  If you own a Vizio television, consider yourself tracked, hacked, and sold to the highest bidder. http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/7/14527360/vizio-smart-tv-tracking-settlement-disable-settings

From Amazon’s Echo to an Internet-connected fridge, data is collected as it happens, and stored either locally on the device or on a remote server (or both).  Depending on how ‘smart’ a home is, every drop of water usage can be tracked, every door opening logged, and every person entering and leaving the home gets recorded.  This does not even include cell phone use that is tracked within the home by providers.  And the computer use!  The things we do on the computer leave traces not only on the hard drive, but also on the servers we touch with every www typed.  Criminals in their home are no more protected from being discovered than on the street.  This is a good thing.

As to the significance of some of these high tech smart home devices, consider that water usage can give inferences as to what was done in a home, such as cleaning up a crime scene…

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/police-ask-alexa-did-you-witness-a-murder/ 

During all the years of being a detective, I did trash runs.  Lots and lots of trash runs.  I hated the trash runs until I found good evidence.  Garbage smells really bad, especially during the summer.  Digging through garbage bags in a dumpster in the middle of a hot day can make the toughest person gag or puke.  But you can get some really good information on the criminals you seek. Did I mention it can smell really bad?

That is one of the reasons I really enjoyed moving into digital forensics.  Digging through the garbage of data on a hard drive is a lot easier on the nose than digging through a dumpster.  Plus, the information you get is sometimes a lot better than what you can find in a garbage can.  There are exceptions…you won’t find the murder weapon in a folder on the C:/ drive of a hard drive unless the murder weapon was a computer program. 

You would think that with the amount of technology available and already in place that police would be able to uncover more crimes, find more criminals, and be more effective.  When a smart home can email the home owner a photo of someone ringing the doorbell, newer cars come with pre-installed GPS tracking systems, and a fridge can record a live stream of residents in the kitchen, the ease of finding evidence should be easier…right?

Not quite.

That brings us to the biggest hurdle to crime fighting: incompetency and laziness.  Government agencies are not immune to the same human fallacies found elsewhere. There are hard workers in government just as there are hard workers in the private sector.  Same holds true for laziness and incompetence, which criminals take advantage.

In any case where electronic devices are not being seized for examination, evidence is intentionally being left behind.  I am not referring to the electronic devices that are difficult to find, like a camouflaged USB device hidden within a teddy bear. I’m talking about the cell phone sitting on the car seat of the suspect arrested for burglary.  Yes. I’ve seen it happen.  Part of the reason is that unless lead is flying, most criminal cases and dispatched calls are boring to the responding officer.  As an example, with a residential burglary, the suspect is usually gone and the victim is lucky if the officer even tries to recover prints from the scene.  Stolen car?  Oh well. Fill out the report and call your insurance company.

I have been out of police work for about 10 years and I had hoped this lack of urgency in police work has changed.  But apparently not.  I recently helped someone with their stolen purse from a gym.  I got the call first instead of 911, but that’s another story.  Anyway, I showed up to give some guidance and eventually the district officers arrived.  Even after being told that video cameras faced the parking lot, and that the suspect/s went inside another victim’s car, the officers said, “The cameras probably didn’t get it”. The manager of the gym even offered up the video and said the cameras face the victim’s car... but the officers they left without even asking to see the video.  After telling the officers that the suspect/s just used the stolen credit cards in a store less than 5 miles away and that the store surely must have cameras, one of the officers said, “We can’t get much from a store’s security cameras.  You just need to call your bank to cancel your cards.” End result: File a report.  Call the banks. Get a replacement driver’s license.  Yes.  This still happens.  And criminals thrive on it.

The irony with a lack of seizing electronic evidence is that for most of the forensic examiners in law enforcement, they love to dig and dig and dig and dig through data to find the smoking gun.  It is the lifeblood of what they do.  If only the devices were seized and given to them.  Case in point:  I was called to exam a laptop of a missing teenager, six months after she was reported missing.   The detective simply did not put any reliance on a laptop, in which the teenager was religiously using for social media, as a source of important evidence.  The teen’s body was later found buried less than 5 miles from the police department where this detective drank coffee at his desk, with the laptop sitting downstairs in evidence for months.  I would have loved to examine that laptop ON THE SAME DAY the teen was reported missing.  It was virtually useless by the time I got it.

Seeing that tech should make it easier for police work, it should make it easier for writers of fiction.  It doesn’t.  I read (and write) a lot.  Technology can ruin good fiction.  No longer can a fictional criminal live his or her life under the radar.   Even the good guys can’t avoid ‘the radar’.   The Jack Reacher series should have been set in the 80s, because there is no way that Jack Reacher can roam the country without ever ringing some bells in surveillance tracking technology and live only with the technology of a single ATM card.  I was lucky that my undercover work was before the Internet really took off.  Backstopping an ID today requires way more than it did when I was undercover.

Writing fiction set in today requires knowing technology, because any scene that should have technology but doesn’t simply makes that scene unbelievable.  Same with Hollywood. Seriously.  It gets harder and harder to watch a movie that intends to be realistic without realistically using technology.   Show me a movie where no one is texting anywhere in a scene and I’ll show you a movie where technology is selectively ignored for the sake of simplicity at the cost of plausibility.

I can hear it now.  Police work is hard.  It’s not easy to get search warrants.  Not every department has a forensic unit.  We are too busy to solve crimes.  We are short-staffed. We don’t get enough training.  Blah blah blah.  I’ve heard it before and proved it can be done time and time again.  I have always believed that 10% of law enforcement do 90% of the work while 90% of law enforcement try to pawn off the remaining 10% of the work (while fighting over taking credit for it).  If just another 10% of law enforcement suddenly got a sense of urgency to require high tech investigations be a part of every crime scene, we’d reduce crime stats in half and solve twice as many crimes.

Now if only I can find a book or movie that doesn’t pretend technology doesn’t exist..