9 ms·

Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases

203 points by appleflaxen 5y ago

coldcode 5y ago
Old quote: "To go forward you must back up". I've seen data migrations that took a year of effort and multiple practice sessions before working flawlessly. I've also seen places where every single backup for years was empty because no one ever tested them, causing major lawsuit losses.
- kiba 5y ago
  It seems to be one of the thing that's very easy to miss for an organization, even if you try to be responsible.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
csydas 5y ago
I think what's interesting for me is the lack of transparency on the system in use here and the guarantees that the data truly is being protected from alteration well. Losing data is common and should not be a big deal for a County sized office, muchless a Texas based one, yet somehow here we are. https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/16/dallas_county_memo.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/16/dallas_county_memo.pdf Reading the actual memo, there's another interesting aspect on whatever "TechShare" is; a quick look suggests this is the site of the software in question[0], but there is absolutely no technical information available about it at all. Based on the blurbs, it looks like some project tracker but custom made for law enforcement, but again it's a complete black box as to what the software does, how it ensures data integrity, etc. The memo is very specific about ensuring data gets uploaded to this TechShare, but this just makes me wonder "how does TechShare guarantee data integrity?", and I question if it really would have helped, but it's impossible to know because both the Dallas County's data processing methods and any information on TechShare are complete black boxes. This adds no value to security for them, and in fact probably just makes it worse as the software is never really audited nor are the IT practices. Combined with the fact that this data-loss was not announced for 4 months after the fact and that cases that may have been affected by the data-loss (e.g., missing evidence), I come away with a very bad picture of law enforcement technology. I'm not sure why there isn't more publicly available scrutiny on the IT practices of law enforcement †, particularly when it comes to handling evidence/case data. [0] https://techsharetx.gov https://techsharetx.gov † As I'm very cynical of US law enforcement in general (many more of course, but right now focusing on US), my own answer for this is that it's intentionally done to obfuscate the process, but this is just the cynical and myopic part of me, which I want to separate from the rest of the post.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  I've been around long enough to notice that LOTS of domains / businesses are really heavy with "we know best" kinds of attitudes even when the subject being discussed is FAR afield of their actual areas of expertise. Medicine is one. Law still is, though less so as digital document management has made their lives a little easier. Law enforcement is a BIG one. You can sell snake oil to LEOs very easily, and many people DO. I think it's a combination of organizational hubris and a sort of "nobody understands our work" bullshit that keeps them from listening to industry authorities and makes them susceptible to ignorant charlatans peddling crap that's Made For Police or whatever.
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    I like to call it Inspector Gadgetarianism. Cops LOVE stupid gadgets and they don't care if they work or not on a scientific level, they just like having their biases confirmed. This goes all the way to stuff like police dogs acting on cues instead of training to showing potential pervert recruits videos of dudes fucking chickens while hooked up to penile plesmography. There's a fuckboat of this kind of stuff, like you could write a book's worth on it considering how much is coming into the fore. Reading the parent comment and it being pretty much "Blockchain for law enforcement and justice record keeping" definitely makes me feel a little off here but then again this one actually looks like it's at least trying to approach the problem of record keeping maintenance. I don't really think there's a hell of a lot out there but this field has an interesting and controversial history. Just check out the inslaw/PROMIS (prosecutor's management inventory system) scandal. I think the US Justice Dept concluded there was no wrongdoing but Canada's RCMP has a very different opinion about the compromising of their law enforcement record keeping system breach.
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  I have a few friends in law enforcement (from local to federal) and I gathered (through conversation with them) that there are "pretty good" processes and procedures in place when it comes to chain of custody, verification, etc for physical evidence. This has likely evolved over the years with various high profile cases, perhaps most famously with the OJ Simpson trial[0]. Given it was the mid-90s that case had no digital forensic evidence that I'm aware of. With physical evidence this has evolved to a pretty tight system where evidence is tracked, sealed, and secured from collection to trial with physical security - relatively secure tamper proof seals, fairly strict chain of custody, logging, etc. In further conversations with them I was surprised to learn there is essentially nothing when it comes to digital evidence security, of which there is increasingly more and more of (of course). Everything from crime scene photos to phone dumps, entire hard drives, police body cam footage, etc. There is virtually nothing in place to track the chain of custody, detect potential evidence tampering, etc for this evidence. I'm convinced that if there were a high-profile case today with a modern legal "Dream Team" the lack of these systems for digital evidence verification would be front and center from an expert (and resource rich) defense. On the other side of the aisle, what's to stop the prosecution from actual digital evidence tampering? This was actually one of the applications that provided the genesis for my startup Tovera[1]. It's still in very early stages but I'm hoping we can make some inroads in law enforcement as I think it has real potential to address the digital evidence verification issue and make for a more transparent and secure justice system (which both sides of the process should value). It remains to be seen if they actually do. [0] https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2014/06/08/oj-simpson-case-taught-police-what-not-to-do-at-a-crime-scene/ https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2014/06/08/oj-simpson-case-... [1] https://tovera.com https://tovera.com
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28149283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28149283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28202847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28202847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197919
- appleflaxen 5y ago
  Oh great; thanks. I hadn't seen those. Unfortunately there wasn't much discussion on any of them.
- onychomys 5y ago
  Heh, the middle one there is from me. I had searched before submitting, but I had searched for "Dallas police", so had missed the one about "Dallas PD" and the one about "Dallas cops".
joelbondurant 5y ago
LOL @ career terrorists.
optimalsolver 5y ago
Did any of the data involve internal investigations?
pwenzel 5y ago
A similar thing happened in Minneapolis very recently. As the third precinct burned in the riots following George Floyd's death, officers at the second precinct destroyed documents, case files, search warrants and records. https://www.startribune.com/as-the-third-precinct-burned-minneapolis-police-officers-in-another-precinct-destroyed-case-files/600078074/ https://www.startribune.com/as-the-third-precinct-burned-min... The lack of accountability at the MPD is astonishing (not to mention other departments), and is the reason they are being investigated by the Department of Justice.
- crummybowley 5y ago
  I feel like the real problem is people burning police buildings, and the lack of accountability in holding every last person who was involved in setting public property on fire to the maximum extent of the law. But you obviously did not read the article you posted or might have sympathy to the folks lives that could be in danger if such documents were released to the public. But ACAB, FTP right?
  - bnj 5y ago
    Do you feel similarly about prosecuting corrupt police officers for abuses of their powers, or is the insistence that criminal behavior be prosecuted limited to protestors?
    - google234123 5y ago
      Police are prosecuted though… go watch the George Floyd related trials. I haven’t seen much evidence that most of the 1000s of rioters have been caught and made to pay for their crimes.
      - joshstrange 5y ago
        > Police are prosecuted though… go watch the George Floyd related trials. Are you honestly making that statement with a straight face? If it takes a full summer of protests to get justice for 1 man then that is not justice and anyone pretending it is is either not paying attention or is complicit. What about Breonna Taylor or the other people (black AND white) killed or harmed at the hands of the police? Where is their justice? The police get off /all the time/ using qualified immunity and aren't held to anywhere near the same standard as the general public. To pretend that police are regularly prosecuted for their crimes is disingenuous at best.
novok 5y ago
With cop IT being so shit, how many cases have been pure fabrications on both sides? Alterations from the government with fake evidence or cases lost with hacks they don’t even realize. Or even better, shit stirred up within government cases by planting fake evidence to put arrows to someone’s enemies.
liokoch 5y ago
The best option is to update backups every week or two weeks. It might be tedious, but it's better than nothing. Also, keep in mind the security of the network.
cs702 5y ago
This is not only embarrassing, but far more common in many organizations that most lay people realize. Data loss is rarely publicized. The shame is that for very little money, the Dallas police could have easily backed up all that data with a third-party service -- e.g., daily snapshots on cperciva's tarsnap would have cost a few grand a month.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Cui bono? In the private sector we have auditors, we have segregation of duties, we have scheduled backups. When people's lives are on the line you would think the government could be at least as good as the private sector after all they create many of the regulatory nightmares that require WORM drives and other technologies for accountability. This leads me to believe this is either gross negligence or intentional. Demand the government follows its own recommendations and put penalties for governments out of compliance.
webinvest 5y ago
This is basically the plot of the Amazon Video TV show Mr. Robot coming to life, haha. Maybe one day they’ll decide to hire a college-educated IT major.
dogma1138 5y ago
If they recover the data would this still be admissible in a US court?
technick 5y ago
I was asked to interview at one of the metro Denver PD's for a sys admin position about a decade ago. Then they told me it was a temporary to hire within 6 months gig, hourly and mostly Windows. I didn't show up for the interview, nor did I call.

203 points by appleflaxen 5y ago

Old quote: "To go forward you must back up". I've seen data migrations that took a year of effort and multiple practice sessions before working flawlessly. I've also seen places where every single backup for years was empty because no one ever tested them, causing major lawsuit losses.

kiba 5y ago
It seems to be one of the thing that's very easy to miss for an organization, even if you try to be responsible.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

csydas 5y ago

I think what's interesting for me is the lack of transparency on the system in use here and the guarantees that the data truly is being protected from alteration well. Losing data is common and should not be a big deal for a County sized office, muchless a Texas based one, yet somehow here we are. https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/16/dallas_county_memo.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/16/dallas_county_memo.pdf Reading the actual memo, there's another interesting aspect on whatever "TechShare" is; a quick look suggests this is the site of the software in question[0], but there is absolutely no technical information available about it at all. Based on the blurbs, it looks like some project tracker but custom made for law enforcement, but again it's a complete black box as to what the software does, how it ensures data integrity, etc. The memo is very specific about ensuring data gets uploaded to this TechShare, but this just makes me wonder "how does TechShare guarantee data integrity?", and I question if it really would have helped, but it's impossible to know because both the Dallas County's data processing methods and any information on TechShare are complete black boxes. This adds no value to security for them, and in fact probably just makes it worse as the software is never really audited nor are the IT practices. Combined with the fact that this data-loss was not announced for 4 months after the fact and that cases that may have been affected by the data-loss (e.g., missing evidence), I come away with a very bad picture of law enforcement technology. I'm not sure why there isn't more publicly available scrutiny on the IT practices of law enforcement †, particularly when it comes to handling evidence/case data. [0] https://techsharetx.gov https://techsharetx.gov † As I'm very cynical of US law enforcement in general (many more of course, but right now focusing on US), my own answer for this is that it's intentionally done to obfuscate the process, but this is just the cynical and myopic part of me, which I want to separate from the rest of the post.

ubermonkey 5y ago
I've been around long enough to notice that LOTS of domains / businesses are really heavy with "we know best" kinds of attitudes even when the subject being discussed is FAR afield of their actual areas of expertise. Medicine is one. Law still is, though less so as digital document management has made their lives a little easier. Law enforcement is a BIG one. You can sell snake oil to LEOs very easily, and many people DO. I think it's a combination of organizational hubris and a sort of "nobody understands our work" bullshit that keeps them from listening to industry authorities and makes them susceptible to ignorant charlatans peddling crap that's Made For Police or whatever.
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  I like to call it Inspector Gadgetarianism. Cops LOVE stupid gadgets and they don't care if they work or not on a scientific level, they just like having their biases confirmed. This goes all the way to stuff like police dogs acting on cues instead of training to showing potential pervert recruits videos of dudes fucking chickens while hooked up to penile plesmography. There's a fuckboat of this kind of stuff, like you could write a book's worth on it considering how much is coming into the fore. Reading the parent comment and it being pretty much "Blockchain for law enforcement and justice record keeping" definitely makes me feel a little off here but then again this one actually looks like it's at least trying to approach the problem of record keeping maintenance. I don't really think there's a hell of a lot out there but this field has an interesting and controversial history. Just check out the inslaw/PROMIS (prosecutor's management inventory system) scandal. I think the US Justice Dept concluded there was no wrongdoing but Canada's RCMP has a very different opinion about the compromising of their law enforcement record keeping system breach.
kkielhofner 5y ago
I have a few friends in law enforcement (from local to federal) and I gathered (through conversation with them) that there are "pretty good" processes and procedures in place when it comes to chain of custody, verification, etc for physical evidence. This has likely evolved over the years with various high profile cases, perhaps most famously with the OJ Simpson trial[0]. Given it was the mid-90s that case had no digital forensic evidence that I'm aware of. With physical evidence this has evolved to a pretty tight system where evidence is tracked, sealed, and secured from collection to trial with physical security - relatively secure tamper proof seals, fairly strict chain of custody, logging, etc. In further conversations with them I was surprised to learn there is essentially nothing when it comes to digital evidence security, of which there is increasingly more and more of (of course). Everything from crime scene photos to phone dumps, entire hard drives, police body cam footage, etc. There is virtually nothing in place to track the chain of custody, detect potential evidence tampering, etc for this evidence. I'm convinced that if there were a high-profile case today with a modern legal "Dream Team" the lack of these systems for digital evidence verification would be front and center from an expert (and resource rich) defense. On the other side of the aisle, what's to stop the prosecution from actual digital evidence tampering? This was actually one of the applications that provided the genesis for my startup Tovera[1]. It's still in very early stages but I'm hoping we can make some inroads in law enforcement as I think it has real potential to address the digital evidence verification issue and make for a more transparent and secure justice system (which both sides of the process should value). It remains to be seen if they actually do. [0] https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2014/06/08/oj-simpson-case-taught-police-what-not-to-do-at-a-crime-scene/ https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2014/06/08/oj-simpson-case-... [1] https://tovera.com https://tovera.com

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28149283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28149283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28202847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28202847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197919

appleflaxen 5y ago
Oh great; thanks. I hadn't seen those. Unfortunately there wasn't much discussion on any of them.
onychomys 5y ago
Heh, the middle one there is from me. I had searched before submitting, but I had searched for "Dallas police", so had missed the one about "Dallas PD" and the one about "Dallas cops".

joelbondurant 5y ago

LOL @ career terrorists.

optimalsolver 5y ago

Did any of the data involve internal investigations?

pwenzel 5y ago

A similar thing happened in Minneapolis very recently. As the third precinct burned in the riots following George Floyd's death, officers at the second precinct destroyed documents, case files, search warrants and records. https://www.startribune.com/as-the-third-precinct-burned-minneapolis-police-officers-in-another-precinct-destroyed-case-files/600078074/ https://www.startribune.com/as-the-third-precinct-burned-min... The lack of accountability at the MPD is astonishing (not to mention other departments), and is the reason they are being investigated by the Department of Justice.

crummybowley 5y ago
I feel like the real problem is people burning police buildings, and the lack of accountability in holding every last person who was involved in setting public property on fire to the maximum extent of the law. But you obviously did not read the article you posted or might have sympathy to the folks lives that could be in danger if such documents were released to the public. But ACAB, FTP right?
- bnj 5y ago
  Do you feel similarly about prosecuting corrupt police officers for abuses of their powers, or is the insistence that criminal behavior be prosecuted limited to protestors?
  - google234123 5y ago
    Police are prosecuted though… go watch the George Floyd related trials. I haven’t seen much evidence that most of the 1000s of rioters have been caught and made to pay for their crimes.
    - joshstrange 5y ago
      > Police are prosecuted though… go watch the George Floyd related trials. Are you honestly making that statement with a straight face? If it takes a full summer of protests to get justice for 1 man then that is not justice and anyone pretending it is is either not paying attention or is complicit. What about Breonna Taylor or the other people (black AND white) killed or harmed at the hands of the police? Where is their justice? The police get off /all the time/ using qualified immunity and aren't held to anywhere near the same standard as the general public. To pretend that police are regularly prosecuted for their crimes is disingenuous at best.

novok 5y ago

With cop IT being so shit, how many cases have been pure fabrications on both sides? Alterations from the government with fake evidence or cases lost with hacks they don’t even realize. Or even better, shit stirred up within government cases by planting fake evidence to put arrows to someone’s enemies.

liokoch 5y ago

The best option is to update backups every week or two weeks. It might be tedious, but it's better than nothing. Also, keep in mind the security of the network.

cs702 5y ago

This is not only embarrassing, but far more common in many organizations that most lay people realize. Data loss is rarely publicized. The shame is that for very little money, the Dallas police could have easily backed up all that data with a third-party service -- e.g., daily snapshots on cperciva's tarsnap would have cost a few grand a month.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Cui bono? In the private sector we have auditors, we have segregation of duties, we have scheduled backups. When people's lives are on the line you would think the government could be at least as good as the private sector after all they create many of the regulatory nightmares that require WORM drives and other technologies for accountability. This leads me to believe this is either gross negligence or intentional. Demand the government follows its own recommendations and put penalties for governments out of compliance.

webinvest 5y ago

This is basically the plot of the Amazon Video TV show Mr. Robot coming to life, haha. Maybe one day they’ll decide to hire a college-educated IT major.

dogma1138 5y ago

If they recover the data would this still be admissible in a US court?

technick 5y ago

I was asked to interview at one of the metro Denver PD's for a sys admin position about a decade ago. Then they told me it was a temporary to hire within 6 months gig, hourly and mostly Windows. I didn't show up for the interview, nor did I call.