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Email addresses. Expiration dates, anonymous ones,

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Lina Maini

The most common form now of interoffice and interpersonal communication is email.  (That technology driven message demon that invites you to  hit the Send button well  before you have reviewed your written missive, removed any potentially incriminating comments or are sober.)

Today, we will cover two areas:  1. How long are email addresses (by public email provider; i.e., Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and AOL) maintained if they are left inactive by their owners?  and 2. Are there anonymous email addresses one can use, for whatever legitimate (I am sure)  reason s/he might need to do so?

When will your inactive public email provider account expire?

Yahoo

  • If you don’t login to your Yahoo email account at least once in 4 months.

Gmail

  • Your account remains inactive for nine months.

Hotmail

  • Your account’s period of inactivity reaches nine months.

AOL

  • Account expiry on inactivity: six months.

How To Obtain An Anonymous Email Address.

Why one would desire or need an anonymous email is a question with too many variables to answer comprehensively, and, it is not the focus of this post.  Our objective is to provide a resources for the legitimate use of temporary and anonymous email.  We’ve repeatedly tested and after five years, continue to use, Guerilla Mail.  From their site:

Many services and web apps require you to sign up with a valid email address, and they usually check that by sending a verification email to your specified address, which, in turn, might contain a link that you need to visit for the sign up process to complete. While this seems authentic on the service’s part, most users feel uncomfortable in doing so because of the resultant plethora of spam and promotional emails that bombard your inbox. Guerrilla Mail is a web app that can solve your problem by creating a temporary email address. You can use these to receive verification and configuration emails, validate your address and rest assured that none of your personal details will be compromised as the app will discard your email address after one hour (default setting).

Every time you visit the website, it will automatically assign a random, @sharklasers.com email address that you can use for one hour. The email address will automatically expire after 60 minutes, during which you can read all emails received on this address. The one-hour limit can easily be increased using the Extend button to add an extra hour.

Once you’re done with signing up or accessing any website content, all you need to do is use the Forget Me button to remove your temporary inbox completely from Guerrilla Mail.

Our Operatives: Street smart, tech savvy.

As always, be safe.

Filed under: email, email search | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Walls Have Ears. So Do Your Cell Phone, GPS, Cable and Onstar.

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Lina Maini
Cell phone tower in Nyakrom, Agona District (e...

Image via Wikipedia

The most frequently requested service  we receive is for subject locates, (e.g., a client has moved and neglected to give  his attorney forwarding contact information,  a transient witness needs to be interviewed, an heir to an estate located).

Regardless of the seemingly obvious ease of locating someone in our now technologically-enhanced transparent society, if a person wishes to remain unlocatable, they will. (I’ll refer back to this later in this article.)

The electronic tracking has arrived,  however.   One of the best tracking devices is a cell phone. Point in case, below is an excerpt from a June 3, 2011  NY Post article:

A 22-year-old Manhattan man was found, thirsty and weak, beside his BMW deep in swampy woods along an upstate parkway four days after he went missing.

State police say Thomas Wopat-Moreau, last seen at a Saturday night party in East Fishkill, was found by searchers Thursday in a secluded area near the Taconic State Parkway about 45 miles south of Albany (Gallatin, Columbia County). His car had swerved off the road early Sunday and flew 400 feet into the woods, leaving no trace behind.

Troopers said they were able to focus their search by a signal from Wopat-Moreau’s cell phone before it died.The tracking technique used by the state troopers is called pinging.

Pinging a cell phone is finding out the responding  cell tower to the phone.   This can be used to locate a person that has a cell phone.

Usually the information is provided by the cellular provider and one has to  have an account with them. In 911 systems, the location is broadcast with the call.   If a subject  is carrying a cell phone, the phone is constantly sending signals to the closest cell tower, even if the phone isn’t turned on. The location of the cell tower will tell you that the person is within a certain range. When the person moves,  they can be tracked by the  cell towers to which the signal is bounced to.

Cell phones now come equipped with GPS so a subject’s  exact location can be determined.  Even when the phone is turned off!! Also, the phones can be used as a listening device. It can be activated via a cell phone tower and law enforcement can listen to everything said within range of the cell phone.  Again, the phone doesn’t even have to be turned on.  The phone acts as a secret microphone.

More sophisticated ways of listening to people are being developed and many are already in use.  ONSTAR has been used to listen in on criminals by law enforcement.   The microphone for ONSTAR in one’s  car can be activated remotely so others can listen in to the in-vehicle conversation.

A GPS unit can obviously identify a subject’s location. However, a GPS can be disabled and is worthless to locators once the juice has been cut.

Cable boxes are also being used to listen in on people in their homes. The signal is sent over the same coax cable to the head-end where a server records conversations in range of the target.

An ounce of prevention…

As we’ve often  advised, if you are in a conference or client meeting or any other public situation in which you would like conversations to remain confidential, request that all cell phones be left outside of the room, including your own.  In high-level negotiations, it’s make sense for the opposition to hire professionals who can easily ping a cell phone and listen in on talks.

Preventative measures:

1. If you want to remain anonymous with a cell phone,  use a prepaid phone and don’t send in your information for a mail in rebate. If you do, the phone will then be registered to your name. If nobody knows your phone number or ESN number then they can’t trace your phone by cell towers.

2. Turn off the GPS.

3. As for ONSTAR,  most people in the know disconnect it.

(There isn’t much that can be done, short of removing the unit, regarding silencing your cable box.)

On a final note, in order to ping a cell phone, one has be authorized. Obviously, law enforcement is automatically qualified to request cell service providers to track phones, but so are investigators, bails bondsmen and several other professions.

Our Operatives: Street smart; Tech savvy.

As always, stay safe.

Filed under: cell phone, locate, subject locate, tracking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Your Tattletale License Plates

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Lina Maini

The Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) scanning systems are one of the newest law enforcement technologies. The system consists of cameras mounted on police cars, hooked up to a computer inside the vehicle.  License plates images are scanned and matched to a real-time centralized database. This database flags vehicles that have been identified as

  • Stolen Vehicles
  • Wanted for an Amber Alerts
  • Expired Registration
  • Expired Insurance
  • Wanted as “Persons of Interest” for any investigation
  • Suspended Driver’s License
  • Outstanding Criminal Warrant
  • Outstanding Municipal Taxes or other Fines and Fees
  • Are Wanted for any other government purpose

The system is matched to the vehicle’s owner via a DMV database. So, you can just be driving along and find yourself pulled over by the police, not having committed any traffic violation.

How Many License Tags Can Be Scanned?

Short answer: thousands of tags per hour.  One police car parked on the side of a road can scan just about every car in sight, including one driving in the opposite direction at 70 miles an hour.  (No, the answer is not to drive 80 mph +.)

What Happens To The Scanned Images?

Every image is time, date and location saved.  Permanently.  So now reports of your driving locations (whether you were stopped or not) have become records and collected into various databases: those of state and local law enforcement, DMVs and the FBI‘s National Crime Information Center (NCIC).

The Problem, You Ask?

As more systems go online and interconnected across local, state and federal jurisdictions,  police can easily identify the touch points of any scanned tag’s vehicle location.

You can easily imagine the knock on your door if you (probably unknowingly… I allot the benefit of the doubt), stopped in front of  a known drug dealing location, parked by a wanted person’s vehicle or passed a toll directly after a person suspected of a crime.  BTW, how many times have you attended political events.  Call the cops, they’ll let you know.

The truth is that the use this placement data can be used as circumstantial evidence against you and we’ll soon find many innocent people in court, defending their drive down Main Street.

Aren’t These License Tag Scanners Violating My Rights??

No.  According to the law, you have no expectation of privacy while out in public.  This has already been through the courts which have upheld that police officers are allowed to randomly run license tags as they pass by.

In the case of United States of America, Plaintiff-appellee, v. Charles N. Matthews, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that a “license plate was in plain view on the outside of the car” and hence, is “subject to seizure” because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.

In the case of United States of America, Plaintiff v. Curtis Ellison, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held:

Thus, so long as the officer had a right to be in a position to observe the defendant’s license plate, any such observation and corresponding use of the information on the plate does not violate the Fourth Amendment.

These new ALRP scanning systems simply allow the scanning to be more comprehensive in the number of tags scanned and permanent. 

Bottom line.

Someone should be asking if any restrictions exist on the use of this data to check up on ordinary Joes and Janes, going about their regular business. 

BNI Operatives: A step ahead.

As always, stay safe.

 

Filed under: scanner, speed, Spying Equipment, summonses, surveillance, technologies | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Lie Detectors In The Courtroom, Part II/II (Revisted and Updated)

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Lina Maini
High Resolution FMRI of the Human Brain
Image via Wikipedia

(Recap:  In last week’s Bulletin, we described the focus of our series, that of lie detection.  This week’s post wraps up this series as if draws attention to lie detection evidence allowed– or more accurately– not yet allowed,  in US  courts.)

“There are basically three techniques (utilizing brain responses v.  those that rely on a machine interpreting physical responses, i.e. the polygraph) that are currently used, and uncomfortably, the latter two, making their way into courts all over the world as “proof” of testimony veracity; NLP (neuro linguistic programming) , EEG (electroencephalogram) and the newest toy of the lie detection crowd: the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging).”  In Part I, we reviewed the oldest and most organic of the techniques: NLP, observing physical eye reactions of the defendant.

This week, we’ll look at:

EEG (electroencephalogram)

Indian court allows a brain scan into evidence.

Based on  a court ordered  EEG, the results were that ”Aditi Sharma…was charged with the murder of her former fiance Udit Bharati, based upon…brain scans that supposedly show she possessed first-hand memories of the murder.”

and

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)

For what may be the first time, fMRI scans of brain activity have been used as evidence in the sentencing phase of a murder trial. Defense lawyers for an Illinois man convicted of raping and killing a 10-year-old girl used the scans to argue that their client should be spared the death penalty because he has a brain disorder.

(I specifically chose to spotlight the above case because of the considerable time that has transpired between when the fMRI test administered to the defendant in September, 2009, to the crimes he, allegedly,  committed in 1983.  Side note:  fMRIs in the Illinois case were allowed in the sentencing phase simply to display the defendant’s continual, long term brain deterioration, not measurable guilt as determined by crime recreation.)

Best summed up by Stanford bioethicist, Henry (Hank) Greeley:

“As we enter more fully into the era of mapping and understanding the brain, society will face an increasing number of important ethical, legal and social issues raised by these new technologies,” Mr. Greely, the Stanford bioethicist, and his colleague Judy Illes wrote last year in the American Journal of Law & Medicine.

If brain scans are widely adopted, they said, “the legal issues alone are enormous, implicating at least the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

“At the same time,” they continued, “the potential benefits to society of such a technology, if used well, could be at least equally large.”

Certain, still truly untested  methods (eeg, fmri, pet…) of lie detection yield very subjective results.  Lie detection is not akin to DNA evidence.  With these newer brain scanning techniques, there are too many factors that can cause false positives reactions (older memories, extremely empathetic predisposition…).  We need to tread careful lest what is at best a strong supposition be allowed as hard evidence.

UDPATE:

Brain Scan Lie-Detection Deemed Far From Ready for Courtroom

A landmark decision has excluded fMRI lie-detection evidence from a federal court case in Tennessee.

The defense tried to use brain scans of the defendant to prove its client had not intentionally defrauded the government. In a 39-page opinion, Judge Tu Pham provided both a rebuke of this kind of fMRI evidence now, and a roadmap for how future defendants may be able to satisfy the Daubert standard, which governs the admissibility of scientific evidence.

Update December, 2011.  The above TN decision remains the national standard. As of today’s post, no US court has allowed fMRIs to be used as evidence in the guilt or innocence of a defendant or truthfulness of a plaintiff or witness.

We will keep monitoring this specific situation.

BNI Operatives: Street smart; web savvy.

As always, stay safe.

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Filed under: Lie Detection | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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