I think what's interesting for me is the lack of transparency on the system in use here and the guarantees that the data truly is being protected from alteration well. Losing data is common and should not be a big deal for a County sized office, muchless a Texas based one, yet somehow here we are.
Reading the actual memo, there's another interesting aspect on whatever "TechShare" is; a quick look suggests this is the site of the software in question[0], but there is absolutely no technical information available about it at all. Based on the blurbs, it looks like some project tracker but custom made for law enforcement, but again it's a complete black box as to what the software does, how it ensures data integrity, etc.
The memo is very specific about ensuring data gets uploaded to this TechShare, but this just makes me wonder "how does TechShare guarantee data integrity?", and I question if it really would have helped, but it's impossible to know because both the Dallas County's data processing methods and any information on TechShare are complete black boxes. This adds no value to security for them, and in fact probably just makes it worse as the software is never really audited nor are the IT practices.
Combined with the fact that this data-loss was not announced for 4 months after the fact and that cases that may have been affected by the data-loss (e.g., missing evidence), I come away with a very bad picture of law enforcement technology. I'm not sure why there isn't more publicly available scrutiny on the IT practices of law enforcement †, particularly when it comes to handling evidence/case data.
[0] https://techsharetx.gov
† As I'm very cynical of US law enforcement in general (many more of course, but right now focusing on US), my own answer for this is that it's intentionally done to obfuscate the process, but this is just the cynical and myopic part of me, which I want to separate from the rest of the post.
I have a few friends in law enforcement (from local to federal) and I gathered (through conversation with them) that there are "pretty good" processes and procedures in place when it comes to chain of custody, verification, etc for physical evidence. This has likely evolved over the years with various high profile cases, perhaps most famously with the OJ Simpson trial[0]. Given it was the mid-90s that case had no digital forensic evidence that I'm aware of.
With physical evidence this has evolved to a pretty tight system where evidence is tracked, sealed, and secured from collection to trial with physical security - relatively secure tamper proof seals, fairly strict chain of custody, logging, etc.
In further conversations with them I was surprised to learn there is essentially nothing when it comes to digital evidence security, of which there is increasingly more and more of (of course). Everything from crime scene photos to phone dumps, entire hard drives, police body cam footage, etc. There is virtually nothing in place to track the chain of custody, detect potential evidence tampering, etc for this evidence.
I'm convinced that if there were a high-profile case today with a modern legal "Dream Team" the lack of these systems for digital evidence verification would be front and center from an expert (and resource rich) defense. On the other side of the aisle, what's to stop the prosecution from actual digital evidence tampering?
This was actually one of the applications that provided the genesis for my startup Tovera[1]. It's still in very early stages but I'm hoping we can make some inroads in law enforcement as I think it has real potential to address the digital evidence verification issue and make for a more transparent and secure justice system (which both sides of the process should value). It remains to be seen if they actually do.
The EFF has already made commentary on this [0], and basically my understanding is that this technology is being advertised and positioned as "expert", and that there is deep science behind it, but in fact it's mostly interpretive, and ultimately state prosecution simply make fanciful deductions based off the results and omit sometimes very important facts.
I think that it is incredibly important that as law enforcement continues to build technology that is only used for prosecution purposes, this technology is heavily public and auditable, as at least with the above, it's quite clear that law enforcement has not been handling the technology responsibly. My personal take is that the technology is only available to those interested in a prosecution, not those you may be saved by it.
- For your signup, it would be useful to maybe do the verification code after the age verification has already been done, or at least make it clear that the verification part needs to be done. I found it when I couldn't click "Continue", but the button was kind of in a blind spot for me
- Also, maybe do verification after you've confirmed age already on a separate screen so that 100% any email you collect there was collected under the indication from the user that they were older than 18 as per your requirements in the EULA
- The download button for the test asset I uploaded, or doesn't seem to do anything really.
- Edit cause click submit too soon: You might want to include a visual indicator on your copy to clipboard buttons that it triggered successfully
- I'm not quite sure why you need geographical information to make an account; as I get it, no money is transacted so you don't have an obligation for much user data
Wow, thank you for the feedback and resources! I saw the ShotSpotter stuff but from a first glance didn't see how it really applies to Tovera. I'll take another look.
- We store the asset ID, additional metadata, and associated checksum in our datastore (for reliability, scalability, and performance reasons). We then essentially mint an NFT with a URI to a JSON object stored in IPFS with a privacy-respecting minimal copy of the above as additional protection against our datastore being called into question. Eventually it may be 100% blockchain-something based but it's such a rapidly evolving space there's no clear "perfect" solution (just yet).
- The age verification and jurisdiction stuff are related to COPPA in the United States (and similar in other jurisdictions). It's my first time dealing with it and what we have in place will evolve but EULA or otherwise I don't mind being perhaps a little more cautious on this front until I can get a better understanding of all the issues at play. In any case we could do a much better job explaining why we (probably? might?) need date of birth and country.
- Overall I'm not thrilled with the signup and onboarding process and it's towards the top of the list for something we need to spend some quality time on.
- I'll have to look into the download button issue (not sure how we missed that).
- Great point on the copy to clipboard buttons!
Thanks again for taking a look and providing feedback, I submitted to Show HN[0]two weeks ago but as you can see it never got any traction. Feedback like yours was exactly what I was hoping to get. Still trying to figure out what happened with our Show HN but that's a bigger issue.
It's funny to me that they will build/secure/protect a large amount of physical square footage to store physical evidence, and that's part of its budget. It would not surprise me that things are so screwy that buying hard drives and other backup type of purchases are not budgeted for and have to be made at the expendable type of requests.
Governments tend to be reactive and only after multiple high-profile defeats and general pressure from defenses did they get around to taking evidence security seriously in their practices, budgets, etc.
Unfortunately it's probably going to take many more multiple TB losses (resulting in failed prosecutions) for them to take this seriously with digital evidence as well.
It's very hard for some people to see and understand digital storage, in terms of capacity, redundancy, and reliability. Physical storage is very visual and very easy to understand: You put crud in a room and it sits there until someone does something with it.
One of the things I find nontechnical people tend to fail to understand is the importance of organizing and cleaning up data. Often when we are running out of space, I get asked why we can't just buy another hard drive at Best Buy for $50.
Then when people do clean up their data, they don't understand file space. They'll spend hours cleaning up old Word documents, but not touch the decade-old AVI video files which could at least be stored in a better format.
Ask a government entity to buy a SAN, they complain. Ask them to buy a backup storage appliance, they ask why we need another SAN. And then in five years, they ask why you need another SAN if you bought one five years ago...
My favorite reference for comparing physical/digital storage was from a former co-worker of mine. Imagine your vault/storage/library with all of the shelves with their contents clearly marked and organized. Now, imagine someone knocking all of the stuff off the shelves and shoving it all into a large pile. That's your harddrive.
> Losing data is common and should not be a big deal for a County sized office, muchless a Texas based one, yet somehow here we are.
Don't overestimate Dallas. I can't speak to what the heck we're doing with actual tax revenue, but the city services and infrastructure are terrible. I actually don't have many complaints about the police, but it's not like my information is rooted in research and statistics. I've just lived downtown for a while and seen quite a few interactions between homeless and police and they seem unusually good at de-escalation and not just rushing in and beating people up as seems common in other big cities.
But ... our infrastructure is terrible. A quarter-inch of rain and over half the street lights in the city stop working. Any bit of wind knocks out power lines constantly, and it's pretty windy. Partly because they're all above ground, partly because the poles are old and falling over, partly because the city doesn't trim trees nor force property owners to do it, so branches are constantly overhanging and destroying things.
We had a somewhat notorious incident a few years ago where someone managed to set off all the tornado alarms citywide for a full day. They managed to do this because the control system was just radio. Not encrypted, not authenticated. Just direct the right channel at the right receiver and you could set off all of the city's tornado alarms.
City infrastructure here is an absolute mess, and if they cut costs on everything else by buying crap and not performing any maintenance, it doesn't surprise me one bit they do exactly the same thing with IT infrastructure.
I think it would be a research project to figure out and I am not at all equipped to carry that out, but at least two factors I'm aware of:
1) Municipalities aren't allowed to run budget deficits, so whenever there is any sort of economic downturn and revenues are short of what they projected, maintenance is often the first thing to get cut. They call it "deferred maintenance" but in practice it's just a disguised form of borrowing because you need to do it eventually and it's only going to get more expensive, which is effectively a different kind of interest. In contrast, whenever revenues exceed projections, there is tremendous pressure to just cut taxes rather than build up any kind of rainy day fund.
2) The existence of cities like Highland Park and University Park. These are entirely contained with Dallas city boundaries, small, and near the city center. They seem to exist for the sole purpose of taking all the largest and most expensive mansions and a few associated shops and public services, and walling them off from the rest of the city to make sure the wealthiest people don't see any of their tax revenue going to benefit anyone except themselves.
Not intending to comment on your broader point, I'm just amused at remembering a story that hit HN last month about a French woman who was accidentally (or possibly maliciously) declared legally dead, and has unsuccessfully spent five years attempting to convince the bureaucracy that she is alive: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-sa...
I've been around long enough to notice that LOTS of domains / businesses are really heavy with "we know best" kinds of attitudes even when the subject being discussed is FAR afield of their actual areas of expertise.
Medicine is one. Law still is, though less so as digital document management has made their lives a little easier.
Law enforcement is a BIG one. You can sell snake oil to LEOs very easily, and many people DO. I think it's a combination of organizational hubris and a sort of "nobody understands our work" bullshit that keeps them from listening to industry authorities and makes them susceptible to ignorant charlatans peddling crap that's Made For Police or whatever.
I like to call it Inspector Gadgetarianism. Cops LOVE stupid gadgets and they don't care if they work or not on a scientific level, they just like having their biases confirmed. This goes all the way to stuff like police dogs acting on cues instead of training to showing potential pervert recruits videos of dudes fucking chickens while hooked up to penile plesmography.
There's a fuckboat of this kind of stuff, like you could write a book's worth on it considering how much is coming into the fore.
Reading the parent comment and it being pretty much "Blockchain for law enforcement and justice record keeping" definitely makes me feel a little off here but then again this one actually looks like it's at least trying to approach the problem of record keeping maintenance. I don't really think there's a hell of a lot out there but this field has an interesting and controversial history. Just check out the inslaw/PROMIS (prosecutor's management inventory system) scandal. I think the US Justice Dept concluded there was no wrongdoing but Canada's RCMP has a very different opinion about the compromising of their law enforcement record keeping system breach.
Well, it recently came out in an audit here in Australia that our Federal Police keep 90% of their records on shared drives with no proper access control or anti-tamper protection [1]… So even worse situations are not unheard of…
Unfortunately seems to align with my anecdotal/limited conversations with law enforcement in the US. Thank you for providing this - with my new startup Tovera [0] I'm pursuing potential law enforcement use cases and it's good to see that some countries/jurisdictions have already raised the issue.
If nothing else you would think "cops don't like losing cases, and prosecuting attorneys REALLY don't like losing cases". Like my comment elsewhere here, government tends to be reactionary and unfortunately incidents like this will keep occurring until the pressure is put on for change.
The tech part of this is the least concerning to me. We all know there is already a lack of transparency in government IT procurement.
The complete breakdown of accountability is what concerns me the most. Not being forthcoming when something as critical as your evidence system fails is, at best, a huge cover up.
Please re-read it - I'm sorry you got downvoted, but you misunderstood what I wrote. Texas as a state is fairly well off (2nd in GDP [0]) and my expectation is more that they would have a fairly robust system set up. There's no phobia here, just that my expectation is Texas has the money to design a better system with backups and redundancies. Even a storage volume level snapshot would have saved them here and I'm a bit shocked they didn't even do that.
The State/County/City balance of authority in Texas is biased far more toward Counties than in any other state. They have 4x more counties than more populous California and over 10x more than larger Alaska.
It reads to me like any "phobia" over this simple fact is inferred by the reader, not implied by the writer.
A similar thing happened in Minneapolis very recently. As the third precinct burned in the riots following George Floyd's death, officers at the second precinct destroyed documents, case files, search warrants and records.
The lack of accountability at the MPD is astonishing (not to mention other departments), and is the reason they are being investigated by the Department of Justice.
> The lack of accountability at the MPD is astonishing
I'm not quite tracking here. What does this MPD have to be accountable for with respect to this incident?
Disposing of PII and sensitive information is pretty standard procedure if you're losing control of a controlled area. When I was in the military we had similar procedures for cryptography, which are in the same realm of PII and sensitive information such as informants or case details.
The military has a defendable reason and history behind destroying documents on the way out in an emergency or as a policy. Gaining and losing territory is part of the business, and the new people coming in are presumably "the enemy". Information being destroyed after it has ceased to be useful is also in the military interest, that is not true of the legal system. The military is also in the explicit business of intentional killings and disrupting existing governance systems, both of which are NOT policing goals.
Police departments do not have "the enemy" and should not have a contingency for evidence destruction. Ever. There is no circumstance where it is reasonable to assume that frantically shredding documents serves the public interest. They certainly shouldn't be destroying evidence in a building that isn't the target of protests.
The military didn't originate this policy, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did.
> IN LIGHT OF RECENTLY ESTABLISHED CROSS-AGENCY REPORTING REQUIREMENTS PERTAINING TO ISSUES SURROUNDING THE LOSS OR BREACH OF PERSONAL INFORMATION BY FEDERAL AGENCIES, THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET HAS ESTABLISHED ONE STANDARD TO DESCRIBE PERSONAL DATA.
I don't think I'd want to be tried on evidence that fell into the hands of protestors or rioters. Provenance is a pretty important part of the evidence of any court case.
It's probably safe to assume that they have confidential informants at play that could be involved in serious crimes like human trafficking or drug trafficking. The consequences for this data getting in the wrong hands would be life and death.
Whether you want to call the people who would do bad things with that information an "enemy" or not I think is entirely up to you, but at the very least you could think of it as risk-mitigation.
It also seems the government has some amount of intent to try to contain the leakage of PII, however ineffective they may be at it aside, given this statement
> IN LIGHT OF RECENTLY ESTABLISHED CROSS-AGENCY REPORTING REQUIREMENTS PERTAINING TO ISSUES SURROUNDING THE LOSS OR BREACH OF PERSONAL INFORMATION BY FEDERAL AGENCIES
> if a precinct is in reasonable danger of falling into someone else’s hands then it makes sense to destroy sensitive data.
Maybe. If there is no reasonable way to safely move the sensitive material to someplace safe. Of course, the set of situations ever where that would be the case and it would be even practical to destroy the material rather than abandoning it to effect a safe retreat is really stunningly narrow. You can construct highly-contrived scenarios, but...
I mean, we have actual maps of where damage was done, you posted one, and it shows no riot damage reported close to the precinct. The closest damage was relatively minor both in type and amount.
So, we actually do know that the 2nd precinct never came anywhere close to falling. The question now is whether they’re lying about destroying evidence maliciously, or lying about having panicked.
The police are fundamentally different from the US Marines in almost all ways, in practice and in reality.
My position is that there is NEVER a situation where it makes more sense for the police to devote manpower to destroying evidence over restoring order. Police agencies shredding files on the way out the door are, historically, not doing it to protect anyone but themselves.
I’m inclined to agree. I think by the time destroying evidence makes sense we’re already talking about a precinct burning (in which case the fire will do it anyways), or a revolution (in which case it doesn’t matter). Maybe there are some other cases out there, but it seems a bit silly imho.
Either way, it’s pretty clear that Precinct 2 never got anywhere close to such a convoluted hypothetical. That leaves the question why they did it, to which I believe the Roman jurors said it best: cui bono?
The second precinct was not burning, and was never in any danger of burning. It is located on the opposite side of the city from where protests were occurring, in neighborhoods that had seen minimal effects from demonstrations.
If rioters had been advancing on the building, then surely their actions would be justified. But there was never any danger to property or persons at the second precinct.
The article GP posted said there was five miles of distance between the two precincts. Five miles really isn't very far, so I can see why that would be concerning. Destroying stuff that has to be disposed of properly takes time (the link I provided above mandates how certain PII is destroyed - generally it's a specific type of shredder) while also allowing time for the people doing the disposal to retreat.
I can also see how this could be an opportunistic tactic to coverup wrong-doing. The two can also be simultaneously true.
I am speaking as someone who lives in Minneapolis, near the second precinct. I assure you nothing dangerous was happening anywhere near the second precinct building (which they had fortified heavily with multiple concrete walls, barbed wire, etc).
If you don't trust my word - you can go look up a map of damage from the riots yourself.
Let’s be honest, “we had to destroy evidence because a riot was happening an hours walk away” is obvious nonsense. There’s genuinely no reason to treat that as anything other than undiluted bullshit.
There is a lot that MPD could’ve done, and instead they decided to destroy evidence at a precinct uninvolved in the disturbances. Given how bad of an excuse that is and their history of misbehavior, it is perfectly reasonable to not give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I don't think that's a "transparent lie", but you sound like you fall within one of the groups mentioned in my original comment.
To me, I can see it being a reasonable response given the nature of the situation. That said, I can also see it being a coverup. There's no details that are very illuminating here, but hopefully an investigation filters out the mud for those interested.
No evidence of danger backs my assertion, that they’re lying about why they destroyed the data. They’re claiming they destroyed it due to fears of the precinct falling; if they can’t back that assertion, then we know they’re lying.
That leaves the question about why they’re lying, which is where losing the benefit of the doubt matters.
- there's no direct evidence that says the precinct was in danger, but it's also reasonable to assume a group of rioters would attack other precincts in the area and that they acted based on proximity.
- there's no evidence to suggest they're covering up for something, but it's reasonable to assume that this would be a good opportunity for someone looking to do that.
In Afghanistan I was part of three base attacks. All three were a surprise and two quickly overwhelmed our defense forces on the perimeter and they breached the base. One was in Musa Qalah, the other is one that made headlines in Camp Leatherneck. The chance to act is a very slim window and that's something you're reminded of continually. So yeah, I don't see it as totally unreasonable but I can see the other side of this argument as well.
> it's also reasonable to assume a group of rioters would attack other precincts in the area and that they acted based on proximity
Its reasonable assumption to assume that they might attack another precinct, not a reason to assume that a precinct will fall. If they say, barricaded the bridge between the two precincts or setup a cordon, that would seem like a prudent response. If the rioters were at the gates and they initiated this policy, that also would be reasonable.
Jumping straight to destroying evidence in the precinct is not a reasonable response. They need to provide evidence that the situation was so dire that they had to resort to their last ditch policies, and they have not done that. Pointing towards riots miles away is an insufficient excuse; they need to provide evidence of an immediate threat of the precinct falling.
> there's no evidence to suggest they're covering up for something, but it's reasonable to assume that this would be a good opportunity for someone looking to do that.
You’re sidestepping the issue. I think they’re lying about why the destroyed the evidence. Once I believe that they’ve lied once, why should I continue to give the benefit of the doubt to them?
More investigation is obviously needed, but I personally smell a rat.
> Its reasonable assumption to assume that they might attack another precinct, not a reason to assume that a precinct will fall. If they say, barricaded the bridge between the two precincts or setup a cordon, that would seem like a prudent response. If the rioters were at the gates and they initiated this policy, that also would be reasonable.
We're also dealing in hindsight. I still think given the climate back then and that a group of people stormed a police station is a pretty incredible circumstance to be dealing with. Now, whether their bias to action was innocent or correct is up to investigation to determine.
It's perfectly okay to speculate and ask for investigations. It's less okay to speak in very definitive terms about something that is quite in flux. That's why I'm a bit wishy-washy on what I believe happened, because any number of variables can produce each outcome -- or both.
I am not "side-stepping" the issue. You think they lied and now you're into searching for an MO to match that. To me, that's pretty improper and it's not how I come to conclusions.
I don't give them the benefit of the doubt, that would imply a conclusion. This, to me, has not concluded. Both theories are still plausible based on the information we have today.
This is America, whilst technically possible, the average american adult has unlikely walked or even considered walking this distance in their adult life to date. On PBS food desert (comical from outside perspective) documentary the average interviewed person considered five miles / twenty minutes on a bus too far.
> Buildings along a 5-mile stretch of Lake Street in Minneapolis and a 3.5-mile stretch of University Avenue in St. Paul's Midway area experienced some of the heaviest damage.
You might be able to say that various people did all the damage, but to my knowledge a smaller group of folks were responsible for the larger damage done.
I'd highly recommend you double check the position of the 2nd precinct station on that map, it's in an area that's very lightly damaged. By my count there are only five instances of property damage closer than one mile to the station, and the nearest is 0.4 miles away. The closest serious damage, a destroyed building, is 2.7 miles away and on the other side of the river.
Not exactly the map of a station in dire straits worried about getting overrun.
I’m not sure if it’s satirical or not either, to be honest.
Plenty of Americans can walk a few miles. Besides, it’s not like rioting is something that doesn’t take significant cardio vascular fortitude in its own right. Something tells me that individually lots of those rioters were more than capable of walking five miles over level, paved terrain.
The real question is not whether or not a rioter could walk from there to here, but whether the riot will come here without being stopped or dissipating into smaller and easier to stop groups. If the riot disperses and 5% shows up at the other precinct, that’s a pretty easy thing for the cops to deal with; and if it isn’t I have questions about what all the public safety money is being spent for.
And that's of course before we look at the terrain. The 2nd and 3rd precinct are on opposite sides of the river. That means that even if you were certain that the riot was coming for the 2nd precinct next, you have a very small number of bridges that you could defend to stop the riot. In fact, cops regularly prefer bridges to kettle and mass arrest both riots and protests, and that would have been the perfect opportunity had it happened.
I feel like the real problem is people burning police buildings, and the lack of accountability in holding every last person who was involved in setting public property on fire to the maximum extent of the law.
But you obviously did not read the article you posted or might have sympathy to the folks lives that could be in danger if such documents were released to the public. But ACAB, FTP right?
This may be unpopular, but since you asked, I am now firmly in the FTP camp. I wasn't always, but it's inched along over time. I live adjacent to George Floyd Square and our neighborhood has a long history of negative encounters with the police.
The department has for decades shown aggressive conduct and forced Minneapolis to pay out $71M in settlements in recent years. If anyone is doing the defunding, it's the MPD defunding Minneapolis.
There is more nuance than can fit in a Hacker News comment, but I do see the need for public safety while at the same time demanding accountability from our police department. I will be voting yes to change the charter.
edit: I recognize that this comment/thread may steer discussion from the original intent of the article here. Mods, please let me know if I can remove if needed.
Do you feel similarly about prosecuting corrupt police officers for abuses of their powers, or is the insistence that criminal behavior be prosecuted limited to protestors?
Police are prosecuted though… go watch the George Floyd related trials. I haven’t seen much evidence that most of the 1000s of rioters have been caught and made to pay for their crimes.
> Police are prosecuted though… go watch the George Floyd related trials.
Are you honestly making that statement with a straight face? If it takes a full summer of protests to get justice for 1 man then that is not justice and anyone pretending it is is either not paying attention or is complicit. What about Breonna Taylor or the other people (black AND white) killed or harmed at the hands of the police? Where is their justice?
The police get off /all the time/ using qualified immunity and aren't held to anywhere near the same standard as the general public. To pretend that police are regularly prosecuted for their crimes is disingenuous at best.
"I feel"... You're not being objective. Your feelings are unimportant. If anyone is to blame it's the IT department that lost the data and had no DR in place. You cannot release documents to the public that have been lost forever.
This has nothing to do with police so I'll assume your emotions or politics are getting the best of you.
I read the article. "Rioters never came for the second precinct. In the days following Floyd's killing, most violence was concentrated on the Third Precinct — across the Mississippi River and more than 5 miles south of the Second Precinct." There was no danger of those documents being released to the public.
Your vision is always 2020 after the fact. The idea that the city was burning enough would be a good enough fear that who knows what the hell would happen next.
Its completely insane that everybody is just okay with millions of tax payer dollars being destroyed. Its insane that folks are okay with completely shutting down probably one of the best invention of man kind and reverting back to pure mob rules barbarism.
I've seen data migrations that took a year of effort and multiple practice sessions before working flawlessly. I've also seen places where every single backup for years was empty because no one ever tested them, causing major lawsuit losses.
Heh, the middle one there is from me. I had searched before submitting, but I had searched for "Dallas police", so had missed the one about "Dallas PD" and the one about "Dallas cops".
Cui bono? In the private sector we have auditors, we have segregation of duties, we have scheduled backups. When people's lives are on the line you would think the government could be at least as good as the private sector after all they create many of the regulatory nightmares that require WORM drives and other technologies for accountability. This leads me to believe this is either gross negligence or intentional.
Demand the government follows its own recommendations and put penalties for governments out of compliance.
This is not only embarrassing, but far more common in many organizations that most lay people realize. Data loss is rarely publicized.
The shame is that for very little money, the Dallas police could have easily backed up all that data with a third-party service -- e.g., daily snapshots on cperciva's tarsnap would have cost a few grand a month.
With cop IT being so shit, how many cases have been pure fabrications on both sides?
Alterations from the government with fake evidence or cases lost with hacks they don’t even realize. Or even better, shit stirred up within government cases by planting fake evidence to put arrows to someone’s enemies.
I was asked to interview at one of the metro Denver PD's for a sys admin position about a decade ago. Then they told me it was a temporary to hire within 6 months gig, hourly and mostly Windows. I didn't show up for the interview, nor did I call.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/16/dallas_county_memo.pdf
Reading the actual memo, there's another interesting aspect on whatever "TechShare" is; a quick look suggests this is the site of the software in question[0], but there is absolutely no technical information available about it at all. Based on the blurbs, it looks like some project tracker but custom made for law enforcement, but again it's a complete black box as to what the software does, how it ensures data integrity, etc.
The memo is very specific about ensuring data gets uploaded to this TechShare, but this just makes me wonder "how does TechShare guarantee data integrity?", and I question if it really would have helped, but it's impossible to know because both the Dallas County's data processing methods and any information on TechShare are complete black boxes. This adds no value to security for them, and in fact probably just makes it worse as the software is never really audited nor are the IT practices.
Combined with the fact that this data-loss was not announced for 4 months after the fact and that cases that may have been affected by the data-loss (e.g., missing evidence), I come away with a very bad picture of law enforcement technology. I'm not sure why there isn't more publicly available scrutiny on the IT practices of law enforcement †, particularly when it comes to handling evidence/case data.
[0] https://techsharetx.gov † As I'm very cynical of US law enforcement in general (many more of course, but right now focusing on US), my own answer for this is that it's intentionally done to obfuscate the process, but this is just the cynical and myopic part of me, which I want to separate from the rest of the post.