Tag: State Police

The release starts:

QR codes (quick response) are the latest "tech"-nique to curb drunk driving by helping motorists easily find a safe, sober ride home. Hundreds of bars and restaurants in Michigan will be serving drinks on coasters featuring the specially designed code. Using a smartphone app to scan the code, users will be provided with a phone list of local cab companies.*

The QR code is meant to appeal to tech-savvy young adults who are more likely to own smartphones than adults as a whole. In 2010, men represented nearly 80 percent of drinking drivers in alcohol-involved fatal crashes. Of those male drivers, nearly 40 percent were men 21 to 34 years old. Statistics indicate men are arrested for drunk driving at a rate of nearly three to every one woman in Michigan.

"The goal, always, is to encourage motorists to be safe and responsible when behind the wheel," said Michael L. Prince, director of the Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP). "The coasters are meant to reinforce this important message."

With the help of the Michigan Licensed Beverage Association (MLBA), the coasters have been distributed to more than 500 members in locations where cab service is readily available.

Wow!  That is pretty cool!  In fact, I am amazed at how the new technology can be used in so many different ways.  And this QR code stuff is something we use for our own business, and have incorporated on our signs.

The troubling revelation that Michigan State Police have the tools to so completely violate a person's 4th amendment rights, has both the ACLU and conservatives concerned, and rightly so.  The hand held machine available to officers can scan and retrieve a complete inventory of cell phones information, including pictures, text, email, and phone records.  From the manufacturer's site:

The Cellebrite UFED Physical Pro is a high-end, all-in-one solution for logical and physical extraction. The UFED Physical Pro expands your current device capabilities to extract deleted mobile device data, user passwords, file system dumps, and physical extraction from GPS devices.

With expanded coverage that now includes more than 3000 phones and a growing list of GPS devices, UFED Physical Pro provides the most complete mobile forensics solution available on the market.

Utilizing UFED's simple and field-proven user interface, a complete high-speed hex dump of the phone memory is delivered without the need of cumbersome PC drivers. Critical data such as user lock codes, and deleted information such as text messages, call history, pictures, and video are sorted and retrieved by Cellebrite's Physical Pro engine. The UFED Physical Pro also includes robust search tools for manual hex dump analysis, as well as an expert mode, which allows advanced capabilities for researchers.

UNPARALELLED ACCESS TO PHONE MEMORY
UFED Physical Pro provides access to data inaccessible by logical methods:

• Phone user lock code
  
• Deleted data including: deleted call history, text messages, images, phonebook entries and videos
  
• Access to internal application data
  
• Phone internal data including: IMSI history, past SIM cards used, past user lock code history

Further troubling, is the reticence of the MSP to provide a modicum of transparency sans a very high fee.  Likely violating the intent of law.  

Straight up, it was a super-wasteful, corruptly built new state police HQ, while the state was laying off 100 state troopers and cutting back other law-and-order funding.

Last year the state completed its plans to move the Michigan State Police headquarters from the previous East Lansing location on the campus of Michigan State University to a newly constructed building a few miles away in downtown Lansing.  Keep in mind that the state police did not ask for this new HQ, and the state police union expressed disappointment in both the timing and the limitations of the new facility (more on that later).

The developers built the new HQ for $39 million, and it was not competitively bid.  For that money, while it will have a big marble-floored lobby and a gym, the site of the new HQ has still been criticized for being too small -- the site does not have room for an emergency operations center, garage space to warehouse vehicles, or a helipad -- and worse, "the federal flood plain prohibits law enforcement high tech and Homeland Security operations from being moved there."  (Here's the link for that quote - read the whole thing, because this deal sounds more and more rotten.)

First and foremost, it is an election day.  If you're reading this, the polls are open and you haven't yet, stop everything you're doing and go vote.  There are tax hike proposals in seemingly every city, township and village in the State and far left extremists running for just about every school board seat available anywhere.  

No, seriously, go vote.  We'll wait...

...

......

..........

Back?  What took you so long?  If you're in Detroit we already know it wasn't long lines, so don't try that excuse.  The Detroit News reports this morning that a measly fifteen percent of the registered voters in the D are expected to cast a ballot today to elect the city's next mayor.  Suppose that's what happens when you get a race between a pair of Democrats who are much more alike than they'd have you believe.  Don't give the voters a choice then don't be surprised when they don't bother showing up to make one.  Not even the 200,000 phantoms on the books.  

Meanwhile, an hour and a half to the west, the Granholm-Cherry administration is set today to unveil their sweeping, shocking, devastating, budget-balancing spending cuts.  Except that they aren't sweeping, they certainly aren't shocking, the Dems' core constituency won't be devastated and they don't balance the budget.  

Other than that, though, the administration is pitching a perfect game.

Read on...