Law enforcement recently has been following the general tide of government and public service groundswell by seeking computing solutions in the Linux direction. Particularly in law enforcement, their needs match well with open source software. They have to work lean on a taxpayer's budget, and open source is free or low cost. They need top security, and Linux is still the highest-scoring operating software in official government assessments. They need mission-critical reliability, and Linux is so stable, it doesn't just outrank the competition in stability - it makes the competition disappear!
Some recent examples of law enforcement agencies finding a solution in open source:
* Kent Police have lowered the cost of running their major criminal investigations system by a factor of 90% using Novell Linux Open Enterprise Server. The migration to Novell enabled Kent to scale up their Holmes II investigation system to work on larger projects with a broader scope - something they'd never been able to do before. They were also able to run it on their cheapest hardware they could find, thanks to Linux's light requirements. A new policing operating system, named Genesis, is now being tested for scalability on Linux servers.
* Delivery of the first Linux systems to the West Yorkshire police force could see police forces throughout England and Wales unanimously switching to Linux desktops in a new pilot scheme. The deployment is taking place under a contract awarded by the UK Police IT Organization. If successful, it will lead to over 60,000 desktops deployed. In West Yorkshire alone, the installed base is around 3,500, and a spokesman reckoned that the savings from this would be around one million pounds per year!
* The New South Wales Police department is currently undertaking a major upgrade to its information infrastructure, made necessary due to the increasing volume of data handled by the force, and they're switching to Linux systems to handle the load. Because the Linux systems are proving so reliable, they are looking forward to the higher capacity network more efficiently archiving and transmitting data stored as evidence, such as surveillance videos and audio material.
* Scottish police forces have also developed a Linux-based system for ensuring that they comply with the Freedom of Information Act legislation, an act which is intended to facilitate 'open government' by allowing the public to request access to government data. Since open source and open information go hand in hand, the system has scaled easily and saved tons of labor. The force doesn't have to worry about proprietary media formats interfering with the public's ability to access the data, and the efficiency of the Linux system allows a lot of manual tasks to be automated where they couldn't before. The system is literally returning officers to the streets because it has saved everyone so much work.
* Police in the city of Munich have switched 14,000 of their department computers from Microsoft's Windows operating system to Linux. The motivation for the decision was to make the government less dependent on one information technology supplier, and to save money while increasing capabilities. One technology analyst even compared the break-through migration to the fall of the Berlin wall, referring to the oppressive requirements of dealing with a proprietary software company's agenda.
That government feels friendly with open source should come as no surprise. Traditionally, the Internet has been 80% Linux and Unix-based systems since its creation. The first Internet services were started and maintained by government providers, who used Unix system's built-in multitasking features and excellent speed to create a fast, reliable network. Linux, a modern version of that Unix ideal, has already established itself as the leading system for server-room deployment, but now the effects are beginning to trickle down to the desktop user level and workstation deployments, where they are discovering that Linux systems have workspace-ready features built in which other commercial operating systems are just now beginning to discover and implement.
Furthermore, Linux systems come with the guarantee that because they are open source, no commercial company can restrict their usage in the future. A platform ported to Linux can stay on Linux, without support dying out and constant upgrades creating problems down the road.
Finally, the inherent security of the Unix computing model guarantees the effectiveness of Linux without the worries over security problems. Because there are in effect no viruses which can infect a Linux system known, and no critical security exploits found in the systems even by government security standards, departments are also considering Linux as a measure to protect our national data under concerns over national security and the terrorist threat in our modern times.
One would be hard-pressed to come up with a segment more under-prepared for their challenge than law enforcement professionals faced with the task of policing the world of computing. Detective work was much simpler when everybody and his mother didn't have a computer. Herein, some basic terms to get you started.
HACKER: The meaning of the word hacker has been corrupted from its original intention. Originally, it meant somebody who was very good at programming. The members of the MIT labs, AT&T Bell labs, and Xerox Parc originally referred to themselves as 'hackers', in much the same way that a ranch worker would use the title 'cowboy'. Not everybody who calls themselves 'hacker' today is admitting to criminal activity. Nevertheless, there has been much awareness of how the term has changed, so that now a security professional working in computers may designate their specialty with a hat color system: e. g. a 'white hat hacker' programs security and encryption software, a 'black hat hacker' practices overcoming security and encryption, etc. Outside of the security field, the term hacker has fallen widely out of use.
CRACKER: What the public actually means when they say 'hacker'. A cracker breaks into networks and servers for all variety of crimes requiring access, ranging from identity theft to setting up a botnet. Contrary to the popular Hollywood image, a cracker in fact is not particularly adept at programming or computers in general, but is merely exploiting a widely-known (in the underground) security hole in a given system usually using a simple tool downloaded from a "hacking" website. A cracker is no more a computer wizard than a car thief is a master mechanic. In fact, the nature of breaking into computers and breaking into houses and cars is almost identical.
CYBERSTALKING: The most common complaint you will be dealing with in street police work. People will use the Internet to stalk and harass their intended victim. The tools for discovering personal details of someone are widely available on the web. It is suggested that you try to use online "people finder" services to see how much information there is available about yourself, for starters.
It is quite easy to find out last known address from a name, a name and location from a website address, a location and service provider for an IP address, personal details for a chat room screen nick or email address, and so on. A dedicated stalker will use every service at their disposal, compiling information from various sources until they at least have a way to contact their target, if not steal their target's identity.
PIRACY: This can be anything from the 'ripping' (breaking copy protection) of commercial software which is then posted online for resale or ratio-download (called 'warez') to the copying and distribution of media (CDs, DVD movie, etc.). If you thought the war on drugs was out of hand, you'll have a similar feeling about Internet piracy. There is effectively nothing that can be done to cure the problem, only half-measures to stifle it. The issue is mired in the international business and laws of the world, the hazy issue of how far copyright extends under what circumstances, the various definitions of fair use, and the blundering incompetency of such entities as the RIAA, which is more likely to harass innocent grandmothers (who accidentally received an unauthorized tune in their electronic greeting card) than go after a real pirate.
Furthermore, digital protections against piracy do nothing to stop real pirates, but are great for preventing you from watching the DVD movie that you paid for on your PC. It may be ten years yet before the world gets a handle on this. In the mean time, take piracy accusations with a grain of salt, and only pursue an investigation if you know the suspect is actually running a large-scale piracy operation for profit.
IDENTITY THEFT: Related to the above entry on cyber stalking, this has a different motive. Instead of the perpetrator having a personal grudge against the victim, this is for profit. Mainly credit card numbers and bank data are targeted, and then sold internationally for sums of money. The means of stealing the data can be anything from 'dumpster diving' for receipts and discarded paperwork, to theft of computers containing customer databases to online scams to con gullible users into surrendering personal data. A huge underground, international market exists for this activity, and it is even said that identity theft drives "the new mafia".
PHISHING: The number-one method of online identity theft. Phishing is a very basic process: you just build a web site that looks just like a bank web site, spam emails to potential bank customers with a link to the fake site and some kind of story about how they need to come to it and re-enter their data (frequently the story is that the bank's site crashed and they have to update their financial records), then record the data and sell it to the stolen identity market. A large segment of the population is shockingly trusting of phishing scams.
'419': This is the most common variety of online confidence scheme. Instead of posing as a bank site, the perpetrator poses as any variety of fanciful characters and tells a story hoping to get money out of the victim. The classic '419' scam is to pose as a foreign price who has a huge amount of money they need to store, and offers to give some to the victim. The victim is then gradually coerced through subsequent online correspondence to send the perpetrator money for some made-up reason like 'processing fees'.
This is also known as the 'advance fee fraud'. The variations range as far as human imagination permits, and includes posing as a lottery authority notifying the victim that they've 'won', a lawyer notifying the victim of an inheritance from a distant relative, soap-opera-like kidnapping plots where the victim is persuaded that they're rescuing a victim by paying a ransom, and highly fanciful plots worthy of a novel. In some countries, profits from '419' scams actually count as a sizable portion of their gross domestic product!
BOTNET: This involves infecting the target computer with a virus whose purpose is to take over the target computer, turning it into the criminal's puppet. These are always large-scale operations, with a global network of "zombie" computers operating at the criminal's whim, who then unites the machines in a botnet and uses it to perpetrate another crime such as spamming, attacks against web servers, identity theft, and so on. The "master" of a botnet is sometimes referred to as a 'herder'. The victim is never aware that their computer has become part of these zombie networks. This is again a part of the international cyber-crime scene.