Bi-pedal robot tactical operators, nano drones the size of
hummingbirds, and artificially intelligent computer programs
are just some of the law enforcement tools that you will see
in the next decade.
By Mark Clark
Reprinted from
Police Magazine
Ten years ago in Police Magazine, we were talking about the
revolution of the 5-megapixel digital still cameras
representing a “quantum leap” in law enforcement. Today,
officers are wearing video cameras and departments are
struggling with what to do with all that data. Departments
are now looking for the best ways to gather, analyze,
and store zettabytes worth of multimedia data. We’re also
now facing hordes of hackers who are targeting computers,
big data, drones, and yes, even our food and DNA. Such were
the topics discussed at a special program on the future of
law enforcement held at TASER International headquarters in
Scottsdale, Ariz., last month.
The program was the brain child of Rick Smith, CEO of TASER,
who recently attended the 7-day executive program at
Singularity University in Moffett Field, Calif. The program
exposed him to emerging technologies that we all will be
eventually experiencing in our careers and lives. He brought
the program back to TASER headquarters and compacted it into
a 10-hour multi-instructor presentation titled “Future
Trends in Accelerating Technologies."
When I arrived, I saw the main floor of the TASER building
had been turned into a high-tech classroom with seating for
about 100, a raised stage, and a jumbo video display that
rivals the one at the new Texas Stadium. The seats were
rather low tech, which made it difficult to stay comfortable
until the speakers started. After the program started, the
comfort of my butt took a backseat to the uncomfortable
feeling of being on the edge of a real “quantum leap” into
unfathomable technology. I spent my day enthralled by what
was being presented by some of Silicon Valley’s best
futurists.
Singularity University’s Salim Ismail set the tone of the
day with some very well plotted statistics about how many
people will be connected, digitized, and hackable in the
next 10 years. This is because of millions of smart phones
with the power to connect us to people across the world and,
more terrifying, connect criminals to victims around the
globe. My first thought was that cybercrimes units in
local police departments are woefully understaffed for
what’s coming at them.
Biotechnology was a favorite topic of the day’s speakers.
Ismail put the human DNA sequencing into perspective, saying
that anyone will be able to get their genetic profile done
for about a hundred bucks in the near future. So what does
the 2008 mapping of the entire human genome have to do with
law enforcement? Well, for one, the technology is now
available to code the DNA from a cigarette butt and use the
profile to compose a computerized 3D image of the donor’s
face. Couple that with the steadily advancing
facial-recognition programs, and you could have a suspect
identified with very little effort. Gone are the days of
combing a file drawer full of photo mug shots.
Throughout the day, I tried to focus the information on how
it would effect law enforcement. Here’s a list of some of
the topics that were discussed and how I think they will
affect policing in the near future.
Drones, Quad Copters, Automated Vehicles.
Amazon.com announced the day before Cyber-Monday that it
will soon be using drones to deliver goods to consumers.
CBS's "60 Minutes" picked the story up, fulfilling Amazon’s
Christmas wishes for a successful marketing ploy. The
reality is that using drones to deliver goods to Amazon's
customers is not feasible in the near future, but it worked
to get people thinking about the future of moving things
from point A to point B.
Police agencies are not allowed to use drones unless they
jump through political and regulatory hoops. But criminals
don't have to follow the rules and are using drones and
unmanned vehicles quite effectively. Drugs are being brought
into the country by unmanned submersibles and rioters are
using aerial surveillance to keep an eye on the riot police.
So that got me to thinking, what is our collective law
enforcement policy on unmanned vehicles? Have we thought
this all out, or are we just waiting for trial-by-fire
education? It really may be trial-by-fire when you see some
of the advances in autonomous vehicles. There are some dark
elements in society that are arming drones, delivering
contraband into prisons with drones, or using them to
surveil the police from the air. So, what are you going to
do the next time you are working an active police situation
and you see an unidentified quad copter flying overhead? Are
you going to shoot it down? Maybe you will, maybe you won’t,
but you better start thinking about it.
Something more terrestrial in nature is the advancement in
driverless cars. Hundred’s of thousands of miles have
already been logged in the Google cars with no collisions.
That’s quite impressive. A handful of states have already
decided to make these cars legal on the streets, the rest
will be considering it over the next few years. Think about
pulling over a car, finding it full of intoxicated
passengers and no driver. Who is actually in physical
control of the car? There are companies that are ordering
these cars by the thousands, so chances are in the next 10
years, you’ll be seeing these in your town.
When you go to the big law enforcement product shows, you
see law enforcement drones and quad copters that look like
something you’d buy at the local hobby store. But there are
more efficient, smaller airborne surveillance vehicles being
developed right now. I saw a product that was dubbed a “nano
hummingbird” aerial vehicle that can slip through an open
window like a bird and beam audio/video surveillance to
remotely located officers. If we could only get the flight
rules for drones more in line with the reality, law
enforcement may be able to actually use some of these
devices.
Big
Data
As I started off this article, I thought about the late
1990s when I was working on a surveillance squad and we got
our first digital camera. You remember the ones that you
inserted a 1.44KB floppy disk into? That was the first
moment most agencies had to consider what to do with digital
evidence. Fast-forward to the dawn of 2014 and you have
police agencies trying to figure out what to do with
gigabytes, even terabytes worth of multimedia digital
evidence. Today we are mulling over the same issues as we
did when we put the floppy in the side of the camera. What
are we to do with all the digital files? How do we secure
them? And how do we ensure that they are not altered before
they get to court?
A cyber-investigator I spoke with recently told me that his
department has more than 100 terabytes of information in
various locations and formats, and it is trying to figure
out what to do with all of it. There are choices right now,
but the reality is that all of the digital evidence storage
solutions of today are in their infancy. From what I heard
at the future trends program, terabytes are the new
megabytes, and tomorrow, exabytes will be the new terabytes.
It’s mind-boggling to consider where all the bytes will be
stored and secured. Police agencies better start thinking
seriously about storage solutions. Are they going to use an
external cloud service like TASER’s Evidence.com or build
their own server farms in their evidence rooms?
Robotics/Artificial Intelligence
Singularity University’s Neil Jacobstein talked for about an
hour on robots and artificial intelligence. There some
amazing things that are being done with robotics that are
well beyond the assembly-line robotic arms spot welding
pieces of a car together. Robots, sporting the latest in
artificial intelligence, are on the cusp of being deployed
as disaster response driods. They are being used as
executive assistants, as well, showing up as school security
bots and customer service avatars. These human-like
artificial beings are being developed with the help of
government programs like DARPA.
Boston Dynamics has been on the forefront of robotic
development for years. The company builds advanced robots
that use sensor-based controls that make the machine
intelligent. If you look at the video of Boston Dynamics'
Petman
robot in action,
you can visualize a future where these robots will take the
place of human tactical teams during critical incidents.
Boston Dynamics was recently purchased by Google, which
speaks volumes for where this technology is going.
Jacobstein also discussed some interesting law enforcement
twists when it comes to computer algorithms and computer
intelligence. How about a computer software that analyzes
and replicates the typical teenage girl’s online profile and
knows how to catch a sexual predator? Well there’s a chat-bot
out there that does this. It knows what dialog to use to
elicit the right information from the predator to get an
identification and conviction. So maybe in the not too
distant future, cyber detectives will not have to make their
own undercover profiles and spend hours chatting with sexual
predators. There will be an app for that.
How about the concept of predictive policing? We all know
about the Compstat model and maybe we’ve heard of the Smart
Policing Initiative, but what about a computer program that
can predict who will be a victim of a certain crime and in
what geographic area it will happen? That would really be
smart policing. That may be a bit far off for prime time
policing, but the technology and concepts will creep into
the regular crime trends meetings and before you know it, it
will become reality.
Future
Crimes
Marc Goodman is a strategist for Singularity University and
an expert on the disruptive impact of advancing technologies
on security, business,
and international affairs. With a background in local,
national, and international law enforcement, he offered a
fascinating perspective on what technologies police will be
facing in the not too distant future. He suggested that our
tendency toward openness in our online and digital profiles
can be great for personal conveniences and socializing, but
it’s also what the criminals are using to gather data and
exploit.
We all marvel at the technologies we have at our disposal to
make life easier, but there is a dark side of that
technology. The dark side has terrorists setting up hi-tech
ops centers and using them to help carrying out bloody
attacks. A prime example is the attack on the city of Mumbai
five years ago. Post incident intelligence uncovered a
sophisticated operations center hundreds of miles away which
fed real time data to the killers on the ground in Mumbai.
The evidence shows that the terrorists used the smart data
to maximize their body count. In Mumbai, we saw smartphones
join the terrorists’ arsenal of guns and hand grenades. Five
years is a long time ago when you think of how fast
technology is advancing. It is scary to think what criminals
will be using five years in the future.
Goodman talked about how a single criminal or small group of
criminals can victimize hundreds of thousands of people in a
single attack, thanks to accelerating technology. Years ago,
the big news was Sony Playstation consoles getting hacked
and thousands of users’ information being compromised.
Today, the big news is the data compromise in Target Corp.'s
credit card system. Again, we are looking at a single or a
small group of criminals victimizing, in this case, millions
of people in a single incident. Remember what I said about
up-staffing our cybercrimes units? Here is a prime example
of what type of crimes we are facing as law enforcement
professionals.
I spoke with Goodman after his presentation and asked him
what we (the police) should be doing in 2014. He suggested
that we gather as much open source digital data on our
targets as possible and use it to our advantage. The
criminals are just as likely to be open in their online
presence as their victims, and there is no reason that we
shouldn’t be using that data to find the digital footprint
of our targets.
How ironic, a scant 27 years after the first Robocop movie,
Hollywood is making a sequel that is set to be released in
February. I’m anxious to see how closely the movie parallels
the realities of the accelerating technology we are facing
for the actual future of police work. I’m guessing that at
the end of the day, we will all be conducting our police
business just like generations before us. We will, however,
have some useful and very scary tools laid before us and
potentially used against us. One can only hope that we have
moved beyond our linear thinking when it comes to adopting
new technology and set systems in place that will allow us
to keep up with the criminal element.
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