Centerfold's Drowning Prompts Police to Probe Possible Spying Mission

A Playboy model from Russia drowned during a photo shoot in proximity of a major European NATO base prompting police to investigate whether it was a cover for a secret spying mission, according to reports.

The naked body of Galina Fedorova, 35, was discovered by coast guards after she and her photographer swam in the Mediterranean Sea off Sardinia, officials told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Police then interrogated Yev Taranovs, a 42-year-old British photographer.

His cameras and a drone used during their shoot were confiscated, according to the UK newspaper The Sun.

“There is interest in the drone footage as this happened very close to a NATO firing range,” a police source told the paper of one of Italy’s largest military bases on the Teulada coastline. “We have to make sure the assignment was not a cover for a spying mission.” more

Could the "spying mission" explanation be a cover for examining the drone footage?

Law Enforcement's Love Hate Relationship with Video Doorbells

Ring Doorbell Helps Kalamazoo Police Find Home Invasion Suspects more

FBI Worried That Ring Doorbells Are Spying on Police more

Drive-by Shooting Caught on Ring Doorbell Camera in Detroit more 

Video Doorbell Devices Poses Risk to Law Enforcement more

Amazon Ring Police Partnerships Rise Nationwide more

The Atlas of Surveillance

Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities. 

Explore 5,300 datapoints in the U.S. collected by hundreds of researchers.

TOGGLE the Legend to reveal how each technology is spreading. ZOOM into any region to see the technologies in greater detail. If an area has no markers, it means it hasn't been researched yet.

Click to enlarge. Go to website to explore. Wired article here.

Assembling an Ikea Spy Case

Ikea and some of its former executives were ordered to face trial in France over accusations they conspired with police officers to spy on staff.

An Ikea unit in France was accused of collecting information on employees and people applying to work for the furniture giant, according to an indictment dated April 30.

In exchange for a fee, police officers provided confidential information to former Ikea executives on past convictions.

This was in turn used to dismiss staff or turn down applications.

Ikea France said it has “always firmly disapproved” of such practices. more

"Recording suspects is his hobby, Your Honor, an innocent hobby."

CA - An Alameda County sheriff's sergeant pleaded no contest this week to four misdemeanor eavesdropping counts for recording conversations between juvenile suspects and their attorneys in 2018.

The plea agreement for Sgt. James Russell, who originally was charged with four felony counts, calls for him to be placed on 3 years'
probation and perform 180 hours of community service...

Odbert (Russsell's attorney) said at the hearing that Russell wasn't present when the recording began and had no intent of using the conversations between Plaine and the juveniles as a way of building a case against them. more

A Sad Case Highlights Perception of Privacy Loss and Mental Health

WA - A suicidal man who was shot and killed by police officers at a Loves truck stop in Ritzville called police twice to report that his car was bugged and that he was being tracked, according to a release by the Columbia Basin Investigative Team.  more

IR Eye of Ra, or The Drone Patrol

Police in Westport, Connecticut, announced this week that they’re testing a so-called “pandemic drone” that can detect when people on the ground have fevers.

The new drone platform will also be used to determine when people are closer than six feet to each other. Police will be able to deliver a verbal warning through the drone’s speaker to anyone not practicing social distancing.



The new drone technology was developed by a company called Draganfly Inc., which has been around since the late 1990s, and uses Westport PD’s existing quadcopter drones with Draganfly’s software. Draganfly worked with a deep-learning company called Vital Intelligence Inc. and researchers from the University of South Australia to develop the new tech, according to a press release. more

Chief Bugged: Former City Council Candidate Arrested at Meeting

CA - Former City Council candidate James Clinton Davies sentenced to three years probation in eavesdropping case.

The charge stemmed from illegally recording a private conversation he had with Tehachapi Police Chief Kent Kroeger after being invited into the chief's office, and not announcing he was recording or requesting permission to record. more

FutureWatch: You've Probably Been Photo-Napped by an App

Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared.

The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants...

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw...

Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be able to listen in on sensitive conversations, take photos of the participants and know personal secrets. Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity. more

"Electronic Device" Found in Mayor's Office

MI - Flint Police are investigating after an electronic surveillance device was found inside Flint City Hall.

The device was found in the mayor's office, Interim Police Chief Phil Hart said.

Hart said he cannot speak as to what the capabilities of the electronic surveillance device are at this time.

No other information has been released because it is still under investigation. more

Former Flint Police Chief Timothy Johnson believed the device could've been in City Hall when Former Mayor Karen Weaver was in office. 

He said she was concerned when she moved into City Hall that it had been bugged with recording devices. So Johnson said they checked her office, even removing ceiling tiles.* But, he explained, Weaver's was the only office they checked. more

* A professional technical surveillance countermeasures inspection is quite a bit more thorough.

69 Cops Get Body-Cam'ed - Clerk Gets Slammer

A former police records clerk in Southern California was sentenced to six years in jail Friday after he was charged with secretly recording dozens of coworkers as they used the bathroom. 

 
The sentencing for 29-year-old Sergio Nieto came after he pleaded no contest to dozens of invasion of privacy charges in October for spying on 69 coworkers (stop snickering) during his time working at the Long Beach Police Department’s downtown headquarters, the Long Beach Post reports. more

Cop Dropped for Electronic Eavesdropping - Nothing Further to Report

CA - The Roseville Police Department arrested an officer of Folsom’s police force Wednesday on suspicion of stalking, electronic eavesdropping and illegally using monitoring equipment...

The Roseville Police Department said it would not be releasing any further information regarding the investigation. more

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article235979622.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article235979622.html#storylink=cpy

Apple-knocker Forensic Advancement - iOS & Android are No Longer Secure.

The “arms race” of mobile forensics – ever-tougher encryption and the breakneck operations to crack it – has become more of a public tug-of-war than ever before.

Cellebrite, the largest player in the mobile-forensics industry, unveiled its UFED Premium last Friday. Along with the announcement came the bombshell: that it can now get into any Apple iOS device, and many of the high-end Android devices. 

“An exclusive solution for law enforcement to unlock and extract data from all iOS and Android devices,” the company said in a tweet.

Those devices have historically been the toughest to crack... more

Police Can't Take Suspect's Garbage Without a Warrant, in Oregon

The Oregon Supreme Court on Thursday disagreed with more than 50 years of state case law by ruling that Oregonians retain a privacy interest in the garbage they leave on the curb for pick-up. That means police can’t search the garbage without a warrant even after a truck hauls it away...

The majority opinion noted that even the U.S. Supreme Court has said Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy “in trash left for collection in an area accessible to the public.” But the U.S. Supreme Court also said individual states are free to impose “more stringent constraints on police” based on their own constitutions.

Thursday’s ruling applies to curbside refuse collected from private homes. It doesn’t appear to apply to trash thrown in public garbage cans in public places. more

The "Yes Master" Bracelet

Children who end up caught in Chicago's policing and justice system are being outfitted with ReliAlert XC3 GPS ankle-cuffs supplied by the Track Group, who use them to log children's movements and to bark orders at them, as well as listening in on them. The children have to wear them 24/7 while on bail awaiting trial.

The company claims that the recording function in the tracking anklets generates a notification every time it is used, but its own technicians have testified under oath that the listening function can be covertly activated. Track Group stores all recordings of its interactions with children indefinitely.  more

Protecting Confidential Information - The Japanese Model

Japan - The government is making every effort to keep information on the new Imperial era name secret until its announcement Monday and officials are even checking plants inside the Prime Minister’s Office for possible bugging devices...

The government will ask members of the expert panel, parliamentary leaders and Cabinet ministers not to bring any recording devices, including smartphones, into the rooms where the new era name will be presented and not to leave there before the announcement.

The government plans to check the belongings of panel members before they enter the Prime Minister’s Office and have government personnel escort them to restrooms so they will not make any contact with outsiders. more

Cops Spying on Cops, the Village President & Spycamer's in Crawlspaces

IN - A second lawsuit has been filed against New Carlisle alleging command staff in the police department secretly recorded private conversations... The five plaintiffs claim that Deputy Police Chief Brian Thompson and Chief Calleb Dittmar allegedly secretively “placed, or caused to be placed,” recording devices in the ceilings of non-essential areas of the department. more

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IL - Former Hinckley Chief of Police Kimberly S. Everhart has been charged with eavesdropping and official misconduct after Illinois State Police say she illegally recorded a conversation with the village president in 2017. more

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GA - A Catoosa County man is facing a handful of privacy invasion charges after he allegedly broke into a Ringgold residence and planted monitoring equipment, police say.

According to the Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office: Samuel David Townsend, 32, of 103 Parkview Drive in Ringgold, was arrested March 7 on charges of first-degree burglary, possession or sale of an eavesdropping device, unlawful eavesdropping, and Peeping Tom.

...resident reported suspicious sounds coming from underneath her home.

The victim said she was getting out of the shower when she heard a sound coming from the house’s master bathroom. The woman claimed she initially thought a mouse was in the home, but that the noise got louder almost like something was being cut...

...a white truck parked out on the street in front of the home and that the crawl space at the back of the house was open...

Sheriff Gary Sisk said Townsend did some work at the home in the past, and that he planted a recording device. more

Court: Authorities Can't Force Technology Unlocks with Biometric Features

A judge in California ruled Thursday that U.S. authorities cannot force people to unlock technology via fingerprint or facial recognition, even with a search warrant.

Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, made the ruling as investigators tried to access someone's property in Oakland.... (however)

The judge in her ruling stated the request was "overbroad" because it was "neither limited to a particular person nor a particular device." The request could be resubmitted if authorities specify particular people whose devices they'd like to unlock. more

Police Surveillance "in an unobtrusive manner, with a sleek, yet friendly look."

Florida law prohibits police departments from using drones to surveil citizens. So Miami Beach cops instead got a small blimp...

(City Manager Jimmy Morales) Morales' letter admits cops bought the "tethered" surveillance balloon to get around the state's ban on police drone surveillance. (The ban, passed in 2015, was dubbed the Freedom From Unwanted Surveillance Act.)...

Morales opines that the small dirigible "provided an ideal vantage point in an unobtrusive manner, with a sleek, yet friendly look." more

Ding-Dong - Security Cam Man Calling - Weird

CA - Security camera captures prowler getting his licks in.

Click to enlarge.

In ‘weirdest’ case, police say man spent hours near door of home in Salinas... they said spent hours licking the button on an intercom speaker at a home in Salinas, CA...according to Miguel Cabrera, a spokesman for the Salinas Police Department.

Police said the long night of odd behavior began about 2 a.m., when he approached the house and stared straight into the camera of the home’s doorbell surveillance system.

Arroyo hung out in the doorway for more than two hours...the man lay down in front of the door for 20 minutes before springing back up...Afterward, he stood with his back to the camera, appearing to urinate into a planter by the home’s front door, authorities said.

Arroyo also disconnected an extension cord that powered the home’s Christmas lights and walked off with it. Hence the potential petty theft charge, Cabrera said.  “It’s probably the weirdest [case] I’ve heard in many years.” more