8 ms·

Vermont Attorney General's dog sniffs out electronic storage devices

49 points by pontifk8r 3y ago

heads 3y ago
The officers are busy. Last year nearly 800 cyber tips filtered through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Officers are carrying out search warrants on a weekly basis and some electronic files have been spread so widely that officers know their hash value by heart. It’s difficult to say whether sexual exploitation and the spread of sex abuse materials has actually increased dramatically in recent years. This whole article feels like a cute dog story with barely any journalism about something that is very threatening to the Internet. Was it was submitted to trigger debate about propaganda rather than on the merits of the reporting? I imagine there is a lot of useful statistical analysis to be done on the list of filenames, their metadata, and various content hashes which could absolutely answer some questions about the patterms of CSAM over the past decade.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Network effects are definitely interesting to law enforcement. There was an interesting podcast about one of the sites that got busted which was being run out of Korea: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/131/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/131/
- simplicio 3y ago
  I mean, the dog angle is legitimately interesting. I've never heard of police dogs being used to sniff out things other then drugs or people.
  - chrisandchris 3y ago
    In Europe, there are dogs sniffing bark beetle, which destroys forests. Much more faster than any humands checking the trees. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle
  - Beijinger 3y ago
    Dogs are used to detect: people cadavers drugs explosives electronics cash bed bugs
  - Hnrobert42 3y ago
    I went to RSA in San Francisco. At the time, I was staying with friends in San Mateo, but I got a hotel for a night in SF. Rates were outrageous, and we were a small startup. The cheapest hotel I could find was $400/ night for a bedroom with a shared bath down the hall. The next night, back at my friend’s house, I noticed the telltale 3 bite pattern on my shoulder. Breakfast lunch and dinner. It itched like CrAZy. It was bedbugs. There was no way to know if I’d only gotten bit at the hotel or if I’d brought bugs to my friend’s home with me. I learned you can hire a sweet yellow lab like Mojo to sniff out bedbugs. The dog wandered the whole house. My heart dropped when he alerted on the sofa where I’d been remotely working. It cost about $3500 to treat the house. They rolled in fans that heat the whole house above 105°F for an hour. Sure enough, they found some bedbug eggs. It all worked out, damn what a hassle. Note: the dog was from a different company than the treatment folks. They do that to avoid conflict of interest.
    - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
      I live in Phoenix and this post just squashed my entrepreneurial desire to start a bed-bug eradication service. How am I going to compete with 'oh just turn off your AC for a day in summer and you're good'.
      - ecshafer 3y ago
        You need to get 113F/45C to kill bed bugs and eggs within 90 minutes. 105F actually sounds too low. But its harder to kill eggs, which you need to get up to 118F. They are resillient and evil creatures.
        Hnrobert42 3y ago
        Yeah. I was going from memory and this was about 5 years ago. Yours sounds more correct.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    Not only that, police dogs are notoriously not great at actually sniffing out drugs instead of just alerting on meat products or on people their handler is biased against.
  - multjoy 3y ago
    You would be amazed what a dog can pick up. Drugs, obviously. Cash is a big one, electronics, invasive plant species, archaeological human remains. If it has an odour of any sort and the dog can be imprinted on it then they will find it. The skill is the training.
RockRobotRock 3y ago
>Mojo can quickly sniff out devices like hard drives, flash drives or SD cards — often leading officers straight to the evidence they need to make an arrest. Do nand flash chips and magnetic platters have a distinct smell? lol :) I'm not saying its impossible but really really outlandish
- janalsncm 3y ago
  The article mentions the dog can smell the off-gassing from electronics. There’s probably a lot of false positives.
- iamben 3y ago
  Yes! I saw a presentation a couple of years back from police dog trainers. Different dogs would specialise in different things - drugs, guns, and amazingly - hard disks! They train them specifically to do so. What blew my mind was the reward was always just a tennis ball. But the dog was soooo happy to get the ball for a short amount of play when it did well.
  - smt88 3y ago
    Drug-sniffing dogs are a myth[1]. They're used as a pretext for illegal searches, not to detect drugs. I suspect this is similar. "Detecting off-gassing" is vague enough to sound like it makes sense, but there's a variety of materials in electronic devices and many of the ones that off-gas (like plastic) are found in millions of other products. 1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-03/fact-check-are-drug-dogs-incorrect-75-pc-of-the-time/10568410 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-03/fact-check-are-drug-d...
    - orjandus 3y ago
      Well, there's a chance that people had used drugs or smoked before, and the smell might still be present. The article acknowledges this, so it's not entirely a myth. While dogs can make mistakes, it's not definitively incorrect.
      - 3y ago
eesmith 3y ago
It reminds me of this part of Vernor Vinge's "True Names", https://archive.org/details/truenamesotherda00ving/page/50/mode/2up?q=honest https://archive.org/details/truenamesotherda00ving/page/50/m... : > You're no innocent. Pollack. An honest citizen is content with an ordinary data set like yours there." She pointed across the living room at the forty-by-fifty-centimeter data set. It was the great-grandchild of the old CRT's. With color and twenty-line-per-millimeter resolution, it was the standard of government offices and the more conservative industries. There was a visible layer of dust on Pollack's model. The femcop moved quickly across the living room and poked into the drawers under the picture window. Her maroon business suit revealed a thin and angular figure. "An honest citizen would settle for a standard processor and a few thousand megabytes of fast storage." With some superior intuition she pulled open the center drawer — right under the marijuana plants — to reveal at least five hundred cubic centimeters of optical memory, neatly racked and threaded through to the next drawer which held correspondingly powerful CPUs. Even so, it was nothing compared to the gear he had buried under the house. Buried would make it harder for the data storage detector dogs to find. FWIW, that forty-by-fifty-centimeter display has a 64 cm diagonal or 25.2 inches, and the twenty-line-per-millimeter is 508 pixels/inch or slightly above a good Retina display. That sounds pretty decent. On the other hand, a few gigabytes of fast storage sounds ridiculously small.
miki123211 3y ago
> The workload has flooded,” Raymond told VTDigger. “And I think a lot of it is the availability of it online, obviously, but the other part is just, I think platforms are getting much better at controlling their own environment and finding and rooting that stuff out A lot of that stuff will be much harder to find out if end-to-end encryption stays legal. Is it still worth it? Very possibly, but it's definitely a tradeoff and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. We're trading off real children being actually hurt against unspecified hypothetical harms in the future. Those harms may be much more significant, or they may not, but we shouldn't pretend like it's all roses.
- sneak 3y ago
  Even the “end to end encryption” option for iCloud (off by default, mind you) keeps the raw hashes of the unencrypted file content non-e2ee so Apple/USG can see who has which unique files and to where they spread.
- vasco 3y ago
  You can justify anything with that line of thinking. To anyone paying attention I think it's obvious that AI image generators are going to end this problem. No need to hurt anyone and people can look at all the depraved things they want in the comfort of their homes.
  - gadders 3y ago
    ...until they get so excited they want to try it in real life.
    - harimau777 3y ago
      Does the evidence support that idea? My understanding was that the information we have right now seems to suggest the opposite.
      - gadders 3y ago
        I've not seen any evidence either way, but I'm not sure you'd get an RCT of this past an ethics committee anywhere. For now, I'm inclined to err on the side of caution and not enable perverts.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
I love dogs but I just can't see myself with one anymore. They get old so young.
bloomingeek 3y ago
This story gives new meaning to the term "off-gassing". I'd like to know how they trained this dog to focus on the scent given off by electronics.

49 points by pontifk8r 3y ago

The officers are busy. Last year nearly 800 cyber tips filtered through the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Officers are carrying out search warrants on a weekly basis and some electronic files have been spread so widely that officers know their hash value by heart. It’s difficult to say whether sexual exploitation and the spread of sex abuse materials has actually increased dramatically in recent years. This whole article feels like a cute dog story with barely any journalism about something that is very threatening to the Internet. Was it was submitted to trigger debate about propaganda rather than on the merits of the reporting? I imagine there is a lot of useful statistical analysis to be done on the list of filenames, their metadata, and various content hashes which could absolutely answer some questions about the patterms of CSAM over the past decade.

janalsncm 3y ago
Network effects are definitely interesting to law enforcement. There was an interesting podcast about one of the sites that got busted which was being run out of Korea: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/131/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/131/
simplicio 3y ago
I mean, the dog angle is legitimately interesting. I've never heard of police dogs being used to sniff out things other then drugs or people.
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  In Europe, there are dogs sniffing bark beetle, which destroys forests. Much more faster than any humands checking the trees. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle
- Beijinger 3y ago
  Dogs are used to detect: people cadavers drugs explosives electronics cash bed bugs
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  I went to RSA in San Francisco. At the time, I was staying with friends in San Mateo, but I got a hotel for a night in SF. Rates were outrageous, and we were a small startup. The cheapest hotel I could find was $400/ night for a bedroom with a shared bath down the hall. The next night, back at my friend’s house, I noticed the telltale 3 bite pattern on my shoulder. Breakfast lunch and dinner. It itched like CrAZy. It was bedbugs. There was no way to know if I’d only gotten bit at the hotel or if I’d brought bugs to my friend’s home with me. I learned you can hire a sweet yellow lab like Mojo to sniff out bedbugs. The dog wandered the whole house. My heart dropped when he alerted on the sofa where I’d been remotely working. It cost about $3500 to treat the house. They rolled in fans that heat the whole house above 105°F for an hour. Sure enough, they found some bedbug eggs. It all worked out, damn what a hassle. Note: the dog was from a different company than the treatment folks. They do that to avoid conflict of interest.
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    I live in Phoenix and this post just squashed my entrepreneurial desire to start a bed-bug eradication service. How am I going to compete with 'oh just turn off your AC for a day in summer and you're good'.
    - ecshafer 3y ago
      You need to get 113F/45C to kill bed bugs and eggs within 90 minutes. 105F actually sounds too low. But its harder to kill eggs, which you need to get up to 118F. They are resillient and evil creatures.
      - Hnrobert42 3y ago
        Yeah. I was going from memory and this was about 5 years ago. Yours sounds more correct.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  Not only that, police dogs are notoriously not great at actually sniffing out drugs instead of just alerting on meat products or on people their handler is biased against.
- multjoy 3y ago
  You would be amazed what a dog can pick up. Drugs, obviously. Cash is a big one, electronics, invasive plant species, archaeological human remains. If it has an odour of any sort and the dog can be imprinted on it then they will find it. The skill is the training.

RockRobotRock 3y ago

>Mojo can quickly sniff out devices like hard drives, flash drives or SD cards — often leading officers straight to the evidence they need to make an arrest. Do nand flash chips and magnetic platters have a distinct smell? lol :) I'm not saying its impossible but really really outlandish

janalsncm 3y ago
The article mentions the dog can smell the off-gassing from electronics. There’s probably a lot of false positives.
iamben 3y ago
Yes! I saw a presentation a couple of years back from police dog trainers. Different dogs would specialise in different things - drugs, guns, and amazingly - hard disks! They train them specifically to do so. What blew my mind was the reward was always just a tennis ball. But the dog was soooo happy to get the ball for a short amount of play when it did well.
- smt88 3y ago
  Drug-sniffing dogs are a myth[1]. They're used as a pretext for illegal searches, not to detect drugs. I suspect this is similar. "Detecting off-gassing" is vague enough to sound like it makes sense, but there's a variety of materials in electronic devices and many of the ones that off-gas (like plastic) are found in millions of other products. 1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-03/fact-check-are-drug-dogs-incorrect-75-pc-of-the-time/10568410 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-03/fact-check-are-drug-d...
  - orjandus 3y ago
    Well, there's a chance that people had used drugs or smoked before, and the smell might still be present. The article acknowledges this, so it's not entirely a myth. While dogs can make mistakes, it's not definitively incorrect.
    - 3y ago

eesmith 3y ago

It reminds me of this part of Vernor Vinge's "True Names", https://archive.org/details/truenamesotherda00ving/page/50/mode/2up?q=honest https://archive.org/details/truenamesotherda00ving/page/50/m... : > You're no innocent. Pollack. An honest citizen is content with an ordinary data set like yours there." She pointed across the living room at the forty-by-fifty-centimeter data set. It was the great-grandchild of the old CRT's. With color and twenty-line-per-millimeter resolution, it was the standard of government offices and the more conservative industries. There was a visible layer of dust on Pollack's model. The femcop moved quickly across the living room and poked into the drawers under the picture window. Her maroon business suit revealed a thin and angular figure. "An honest citizen would settle for a standard processor and a few thousand megabytes of fast storage." With some superior intuition she pulled open the center drawer — right under the marijuana plants — to reveal at least five hundred cubic centimeters of optical memory, neatly racked and threaded through to the next drawer which held correspondingly powerful CPUs. Even so, it was nothing compared to the gear he had buried under the house. Buried would make it harder for the data storage detector dogs to find. FWIW, that forty-by-fifty-centimeter display has a 64 cm diagonal or 25.2 inches, and the twenty-line-per-millimeter is 508 pixels/inch or slightly above a good Retina display. That sounds pretty decent. On the other hand, a few gigabytes of fast storage sounds ridiculously small.

miki123211 3y ago

> The workload has flooded,” Raymond told VTDigger. “And I think a lot of it is the availability of it online, obviously, but the other part is just, I think platforms are getting much better at controlling their own environment and finding and rooting that stuff out A lot of that stuff will be much harder to find out if end-to-end encryption stays legal. Is it still worth it? Very possibly, but it's definitely a tradeoff and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. We're trading off real children being actually hurt against unspecified hypothetical harms in the future. Those harms may be much more significant, or they may not, but we shouldn't pretend like it's all roses.

sneak 3y ago
Even the “end to end encryption” option for iCloud (off by default, mind you) keeps the raw hashes of the unencrypted file content non-e2ee so Apple/USG can see who has which unique files and to where they spread.
vasco 3y ago
You can justify anything with that line of thinking. To anyone paying attention I think it's obvious that AI image generators are going to end this problem. No need to hurt anyone and people can look at all the depraved things they want in the comfort of their homes.
- gadders 3y ago
  ...until they get so excited they want to try it in real life.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    Does the evidence support that idea? My understanding was that the information we have right now seems to suggest the opposite.
    - gadders 3y ago
      I've not seen any evidence either way, but I'm not sure you'd get an RCT of this past an ethics committee anywhere. For now, I'm inclined to err on the side of caution and not enable perverts.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

I love dogs but I just can't see myself with one anymore. They get old so young.

bloomingeek 3y ago

This story gives new meaning to the term "off-gassing". I'd like to know how they trained this dog to focus on the scent given off by electronics.