Web 2.0 is changing how the world works and plays--for law enforcement agencies, it poses challenges in the form of false information and data theft, as well as new opportunities in surveillance and in public gathering intelligence, according to Sun Microsystems.
In an exclusive interview, Hong-Eng Koh, global government industry director for public safety and criminal justice at Sun Microsystems, said that one of the most basic problems of Web 2.0 is dealing with user-generated content and separating reliable information from hoaxes and jokes.
One example is the plight of the endangered Pacific tree octopus. The site campaigning for its survival has been linked to by Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia, but in reality there is no such thing as the Pacific tree octopus, despite the official looking Web site and campaign. With more and more children and students relying on Yahoo Answers for their school work, this can be a problem and shows how easy it can be to feed misinformation to the public.
There is a Facebook account supposedly belonging to Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, which seems official at first, but only when online users realize that one of his so-called friends is Mao Zedong, does one realize that it is fake.
On the other hand, Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs George Yeo does have a Facebook page which he keeps updated with his status, telling his constituents and the world what he is doing and where he will be having dinner with his family that night. The problem from a law enforcement point of view is that, he is also telling all the people who might want to kill him where he may be.
Researchers in Greece have also managed to create a seemingly innocent looking Facebook application that turns anyone using it into a potential botnet zombie (machines under the control of another that can be used to launch cyberattacks against a third party).
Other threats that law enforcement needs to be involved with includes cyberbullying and cyber-vigilantes.
Koh spoke of one case in Singapore where a wife committed suicide but not before writing about her husband's extra-marital affair on her blog. Since then, thousands of netizens in Singapore have ensured that her husband lost his job and is ostracized from society.
For police in particular, there is the problem of videos of police brutality being published to the Internet. Koh himself was a former policeman and used to be a press officer for his force. Today, he tells police that every single person has to be treated like a member of the press as everyone has cameras that can take videos and pictures and perhaps write a blog.
Second Life with its Linden dollars that can be converted to real US dollars is home to lots of casinos which can be used to launder money, either turning drug money legitimate or to funnel clean money for terrorism. Then there is virtual prostitution where paedophiles pay for virtual sex with virtual children and then trade pictures of real child-abuse victims.
Back in the real world, Koh spoke of trains in Poland being crashed after hackers broke into the rail control network and said that more and more cyberterrorism is now aimed at causing real-world mayhem.
Trash-digging is what happened to U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The person who broke into her e-mail account did not use conventional "hacking" techniques (and is now trying to stop the media from calling him a hacker), but simply searched for information on Google and Wikipedia on Palin and guessed her passwords which was simply a memorable word in her life.
Rather than react to the new challenges and problems from Web 2.0, Koh said that law enforcement should embrace new technology in implementing what he termed Reaching Out 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, Intelligence 2.0 and Security 3.0.
"Security needs to be one step ahead of the rest," he explained.
Reaching Out 2.0 is used by the Singapore Police to put forward their side of the story and show videos that, for instance, depict the police responding with reasonable force to violent protesters and not, as some would like us to believe, acts of unprovoked police brutality. Vancouver police have a presence in Second Life as has the Portuguese eJustice center that uses real judges to arbitrate on events in Second Life for a fee, for everyone in Second Life and not just for Portuguese or European Union users. New York invites citizens to send pictures and videos that could possibly be useful to an investigation.
Collaboration 2.0 is all about getting access to the right information no matter what device is being used. Here, Koh sounded more like a typical IT geek explaining how virtualization can any device on the front end, be it Windows, Mac, mobile or thin client, through a virtualization infrastructure to any of the Unix, Linux, Solaris or legacy Mainframe servers allowing front line police to access any information, anywhere and at any time.
However, one crucial difference between law enforcement agencies and the typical corporate set-up is the attacks from hackers and criminals which is much more intense. One police force in Pakistan replaced 9,000 of its front-line PCs with Sun's thin client, the SunRay. Unlike some of the competition which have an embedded (Windows CE or Linux) OS that could be susceptible to attack, the SunRay is more similar to a phone which simply opens a connection to display the virtual machine back in the data center. Aside from the security, it saves on deployment complexity and maintenance and cuts power consumption, which is important especially in rural police stations which have limited electricity.
Collaboration 2.0 can be used to help law enforcement agencies work together. In the United States, 16 intelligence agencies have got together to create A-Space which CNN called a "Facebook for Spies" so they can share information and work together.
Intelligence 2.0 is using the Internet to search for information about criminals. One criminal hacked a bank's system and charged up a debit card. The bank robber covered his tracks well and used a new, anonymous e-mail account for the e-Banking account. However, he was stupid enough to later use that free e-mail address to create a Facebook account all about himself and was promptly identified and caught. Searching the Internet and Facebook for clues can often be very useful and some police forces have teams of people sourcing the Internet full time looking for leads.
Intelligence 2.0 is also about sourcing data sets and finding correlations. Data from phone records, Internet access, SMS, travel or video can be collected put into a huge database. The difference here is that while most corporate data warehouses are measured in the terabytes, law enforcement needs to keep petabytes of data. The algorithms and work processes are also very different than in the business world. One example would be identifying two people who contact each other but using a multitude of handsets, SIM cards, different Internet cafes and IP addresses.
Asked what he thought about the trend of blocking extremists' Web sites and censorship, Koh asked if it was possible to block everything that was objectionable as there is huge, unlimited supply. Rather, society should focus on limiting the demand for such information.
Worse, if we are to block sites or technologies, there is the risk that the criminals will fall back to other, more encrypted and clandestine, technologies that will make policing even more difficult.
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