All the talk is about more U.S. troops. But if there’s going to be a shot in hell of win­ning the war in Iraq, it’ll be up to the Iraqi police, argues Bing West in the cur­rent Atlantic. And those cops will need to be equipped with the lat­est crime-fighting gear.

In the United States, a cop who pulls you over calls up your record and finds out where and when you were last stopped, and what the charge was. The Chicago police [well, some of ‘em — ed.] carry a device that takes fin­ger­prints and trans­mits them over the radio, with the results of a data­base search received in min­utes.
In Iraq, the police have no detec­tive equip­ment; no reli­able iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem has been widely fielded. As a result, American sol­diers on patrol futilely call in [if they can even call — ed.] the pho­netic spelling of Iraqi names on what­ever ID card they are handed…) A few enter­pris­ing American rifle com­pa­nies have con­ducted their own inde­pen­dent cen­suses, employ­ing rudi­men­tary spread­sheets and per­sonal dig­i­tal cam­eras. But no cen­tral infor­ma­tion sys­tem exists.
This is the great­est tech­ni­cal fail­ure of the war. For all of our efforts, we have ignored one of the most fun­da­men­tal axioms of coun­terin­sur­gency war­fare: an insur­gency can­not be defeated if the enemy can­not be identified.

Now, of course, tech alone isn’t a solu­tion. There needs to be a major upgrade of the Iraqi police, which West calls “among the most wretched in the world. New York City cops send some 26,000 crim­i­nals to prison every year; in Baghdad, with twenty times the mur­der rate, that num­ber is at best 2,000.” And the local cops are often in bed with mili­tias like the Mahdi Army.
But “when U.S. mil­i­tary man­power and tech­nol­ogy work hand in hand with” com­pe­tent Iraqi cops, “the com­bi­na­tion can be effec­tive,” West says.

Every day, aer­ial cam­eras hover over Anbar; some are mounted on unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles (UAVs) and oth­ers on heli­copters; some are infrared, oth­ers stream down video in sharp, bril­liant col­ors. I was in a com­pany oper­a­tions cen­ter in Haditha when Captain Bert Lewis, the air offi­cer, pointed at a screen show­ing a video feed… On the screen, we watched a man in a white dish­dasha hastily scoop­ing dirt over a boxy pack­age, while cars passed by with­out slow­ing down.
“FedEx deliv­ery,” Lewis said, to gen­eral laugh­ter. “I don’t believe this dude.” The Nissan drove away as the man fin­ished pack­ing dirt around the impro­vised explo­sive device, or IED…
“Nail that sucker,” Lieutenant Joshua Booth said… The man looked up and down the street, and then ran south. The pic­ture tilted, then zoomed in, hold­ing him in the cen­ter of the frame. A series of black num­bers scrolled along the right edge, updat­ing the GPS coor­di­nates. The tar­get, solidly built and in his mid-thirties, had left the road and was now run­ning along the river­bank…
As a Quick Reaction Force patrol closed on the GPS coor­di­nates, the fugi­tive sat down in the shade of a palm tree, beck­on­ing to some­one on the river. Just as a square-nosed wooden skiff punted up to the man, the QRF, mounted in two Humvees, con­verged on the river­bank. The man scram­bled to his feet, saw he had no place to run, and half-raised his arms to show he had no weapon.

(Big ups: PC)

Over the last few weeks, the Philadelphia Inquirer has been slowly spool­ing out one of the most inter­est­ing, most ambi­tious jour­nal­is­tic under­tak­ings of the year: an 8-part series — com­plete with a ton of online extras — on an Internet drug-smuggling ring, import­ing ille­gal phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals into this coun­try from India. Here’s a snip­pet from the first install­ment. But, when you’ve got some time, do your­self a favor and read the whole thing.

Whenever DEA super­vi­sor Jeff Breeden grew ner­vous, he would rub his fore­head with his left hand. Now, as the arrest brief­ing began, Breeden dug deep into his brow.
Tomorrow’s world­wide take­down of the Bansal net­work was to be mon­i­tored from this drab con­fer­ence room over­look­ing Independence Mall.
The net­work sup­plied a rain­bow of pills — painkillers, sleep aids, seda­tives, stim­u­lants, steroids, psy­chotrop­ics, erectile-dysfunction med­ica­tion. Thousands of orders a day.
Who knew who made this stuff, where it came from, what was in it? The pub­lic health risk that Internet drugs posed, Breeden thought, was incal­cu­la­ble.
Yet no one in DEA had ever worked a major global online phar­macy inves­ti­ga­tion. He knew it was a career case, one col­leagues would always link to his name. Breeden? Yeah, he’s the guy who super­vised the Internet pill case out of Philly.
To take down the net­work, agents were using a num­ber of weapons — sur­veil­lance, under­cover buys, cell-tower pings, trash pulls, e-mail wire­taps, bank sub­poe­nas, immi­gra­tion reports, even pro­vi­sions of the Patriot Act. Agents here had flown to Australia, Costa Rica and India.
As Breeden lis­tened to the arrest brief­ing, he thought about every­thing that could go wrong.
Would for­eign banks and gov­ern­ments coop­er­ate? Or would they pro­tect the tar­gets, allow­ing Akhil and oth­ers to flee with mil­lions? Would mag­is­trates in sev­eral states autho­rize search war­rants in time? Would the bad guys be there when agents raided their homes at dawn? Had any of them got­ten wind of the pre­ma­ture arrest in New York? Did Akhil, as he implied in e-mails, really have a mole inside U.S. Customs?
Had they over­looked anything?

Over the sum­mer, I spent months inves­ti­gat­ing a triple-homicide in Tacoma, Washington. The results are in this month’s Wired mag­a­zine; it’s my first arti­cle as a con­tribut­ing edi­tor there.
The story cen­ters around Daniel Varo, one of three friends shot in the head by a buddy from the MySpace online social net­work. When Varo died, his far-flung col­lec­tion of rel­a­tives and friends gath­ered on MySpace, to con­sole each other, to plan his memo­r­ial, and to vent their rage over his mur­der. People who had never met face-to-face sud­denly became the most trusted of con­fi­dants. Along the way, they dis­cov­ered that Varo didn’t com­pletely dis­ap­pear when he died. Varo had had spent so much time online that scraps of his life lin­gered on the Web — a ghost in the net­worked machines.
I’m really proud of the piece. I hope you’ll give it a read.
And if you want to dive fur­ther into Varo’s story, you can check out court doc­u­ments, the killer’s now-deleted MySpace pages, and a reporter’s note­book.
Lastly, think about giv­ing some money to Varo’s memo­r­ial fund. You can make dona­tions through PayPal to danielvaromemorialaccount@yahoo.com. Finish the story, and you’ll see why this matters.

Five months ago, hacker-legend-turned-Wired-News-editor Kevin Poulsen wrote an auto­mated script that searched MySpace’s 1 million-plus pro­files for reg­is­tered sex offend­ers. Soon, the pro­gram fig­ured out that one — 39-year-old Andrew Lubrano — “was back on the prowl for seri­ously under­age boys.” Suffolk County, NY cops were alerted. And Poulsen got to go along with them, as they busted the scum­bag. Reason # 987 why Poulsen is my hero.

I don’t like foot­ball (read: soc­cer) any more than you do. But we can prob­a­bly agree that the arrival of those lust­ful foot­ball fans on German soil for the World Cup is a good test for a multi-national secu­rity force.
A com­bi­na­tion of Stella Artois, 30 degree heat and dis­cus­sion about my native England’s “chances” cre­ate a men­tal state capa­ble of (and fit for) quite a lot of pun­ish­ment. And it’s not just the Germans that want a chance to beat the crap out of these morons.
13 Countries have queued for an oppor­tu­nity to get on the action with about 80 uni­formed British offi­cers tak­ing part in the largest joint police oper­a­tion in European his­tory. Its also worth not­ing the threats to this World Cup are roughly com­pa­ra­ble to those in a mod­ern bat­tle­field — peace­ful and vio­lent demon­stra­tors, far right/left wing groups, multi-ethnic /multi-religious group ten­sions and pos­si­ble for­eign ter­ror­ism will make affec­tive secu­rity and polic­ing a chal­lenge.
Along with the usual sur­veil­lance equip­ment asso­ci­ated with mod­ern sport­ing events, some of the 2006 World Cup tech­nol­ogy includes:

* Fast Fingerprinting devices allow­ing German police to trans­mit iden­ti­fi­ca­tion data to be matched against archives stored in the cen­tral data­base of the German Federal Intelligence Service.
* Facial recog­ni­tion CCTV in the sta­di­ums will allow cam­eras to record bio­met­ric facial fea­tures of sus­pected hooli­gans which can be checked in real time against pho­tos stored in the cen­tral data­base.
* RFID chips in more than 3 mil­lion tick­ets will include iden­ti­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion that will be checked as hold­ers pass through entrance gates. Those with the tick­ets have had to pro­vide per­sonal data such as name, address, nation­al­ity, and pass­port num­ber (with minor out­rage)
* NATO AWACS planes and the German Air Force will patrol the skies above Germany through­out the tour­na­ment main­tain­ing an exclu­sion zone around the sta­di­ums.
* 5,000 pri­vate secu­rity, 7,000 German army troops and 30,000 German police (luck­ily unarmed) are sup­ple­mented by vol­un­teer groups; most notably the now mil­i­tant “Die Hasselhoff, Die.”

The Germans are being quite coy on the cost of all this, other than it’s “less” than the $1 bil­lion spent in the Athens Olympics. They actu­ally seem more impressed with their new ball and the game’s motto: “a time to make friends”.
For me, the World Cup just wouldn’t be the same with­out Henry “4–4-2″ Kissinger, so for you ner­vous first-timers here’s a snip­pet of his 2000 word coma-fest explain­ing the game — you should wake up around mid-July, well after the end of the tournament:

In eight groups of four, each team plays the oth­ers in its group. The top two teams of each group advance to a sudden-death round…Manipulating a ball by foot along a 110-yard-long field into an oppos­ing goal requires skills anal­o­gous to ballet…This turns the game into a kind of geom­e­try of find­ing uncov­ered open spaces from which to launch an unim­peded shot on the goal…The result was a kind of total foot­ball: what­ever the assigned posi­tion of the player, he had the addi­tional task of rein­forc­ing the cen­ter of grav­ity, attack or defense, depend­ing on the situation.

– Steven Snell

Right now, mil­i­tary “pros­e­cu­tions only hap­pen when a com­man­der decides to have them,” writes Defense Tech pal Eric Umansky in today’s Slate. “If an offi­cer believes some­body under his com­mand might have done wrong, then the com­man­der can go after him and bring charges. Or not. It’s all up to his dis­cre­tion.”
In light of the Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and other inves­ti­ga­tions, Umansky argues, “What we need is an inde­pen­dent prosecutor’s office, a place where a Patrick Fitzgerald-type can hang his hat and go after wrong­do­ing wher­ever it may be in the chain of com­mand.”
What do you guys think? Is Eric on to some­thing, or not?
UPDATE 06/13/06 07:32 AM: “Umanksy isn’t nec­es­sar­ily wrong, but he isn’t exactly right either,” says John over at Op For.

It is true that com­man­ders have excep­tional power when it comes to the pros­e­cu­tion and pun­ish­ment of their troops, but the way Umansky spins the story makes it sound like indi­vid­ual com­man­ders are the end all/be all for mil­i­tary jus­tice. In real­ity, the mil­i­tary legal sys­tem –from inves­ti­ga­tion to pros­e­cu­tion– is an incred­i­bly com­plex, multi-layered entity, in which the unit com­man­der is a sin­gle stone in the tech­ni­col­ored mosiac

Chicago cops have a well-deserved rep­u­ta­tion for being the tough­est guys in a tough town. But you’ve got to won­der how many heads they are going to have to crack to keep that rep­u­ta­tion up, now that more and more offi­cers are rid­ing around the Windy City on Segway scoot­ers.
The CPD is spend­ing about a half-million dol­lars to buy up 100 scoot­ers and parts. That’s on top of the 50 Segways already in use at O’Hare and Midway air­ports, and around the lake­front.
Cops have become a key mar­ket for the scooter-maker, after the machines failed to catch on with the gen­eral pub­lic. Around the coun­try, 125 law enforce­ment agen­cies now use Segways, the com­pany claims.

In Los Angeles County… offi­cers prize it because it allows them to stand a head taller than they would on foot, so they can see over crowds and cars and project a more promi­nent pres­ence at events like the Rose Bowl parade.
The scoot­ers, which travel as fast as 12.5 mph, also allow an offi­cer on patrol to cover a much greater dis­tance than on foot, and go indoors, onto ele­va­tors and other places big­ger vehi­cles can’t. Blair said the added effi­ciency allows a force to cut down on the num­ber of patrol offi­cers on each shift and recoup the Segway’s cost in as quickly as a month.
Several bomb squads such as those in Ventura County, Calif., and Little Rock, Ark., use Segways to trans­port offi­cers in bulky bombproof and hazardous-material suits that can weigh as much as 100 pounds. The Segway allows them to scoot in and out of a scene quickly, with­out hav­ing to wad­dle in on foot. 

Last year, Segway came out with its i80 police model, which fea­tures a longer bat­tery life, giv­ing the scooter the an energy effi­ciency equiv­a­lent of 450 miles per hour gal­lon — with no emis­sions. The machine also boasts “Reflective Trim [that] helps estab­lish your pres­ence and enhance offi­cer vis­i­bil­ity” and a “Comfort Mat [that] alle­vi­ates fatigue that can occur when stand­ing for long peri­ods.” Not that Chicago cops get tired. Ever.
(Big ups: Gizmag)

… for this?

The Veterans Affairs Department learned about the theft of elec­tronic data on 26.5 mil­lion vet­er­ans shortly after it occurred, on May 3, but waited two weeks before telling law enforce­ment agen­cies, offi­cials said Tuesday.
The offi­cials said inves­ti­ga­tors in the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were furi­ous with the lead­ers of the vet­er­ans agency for ini­tially try­ing to han­dle the loss of the data [pos­si­bly the largest data theft ever] s an inter­nal prob­lem through the agency’s inspec­tor gen­eral before com­ing for­ward.
Officials said the inves­ti­ga­tors in the Justice Department and F.B.I. had com­plained that the delay might have cost them clues to the where­abouts of the data, stored on com­puter disks that were stolen in a bur­glary on May 3 at the home of an agency employee in Maryland.

UPDATE 3:09 PM: This gets even bet­ter. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson “was not told about the miss­ing data until the night of May 16, or 13 days after the discs con­tain­ing the data were stolen in a bur­glary at the res­i­dence of a depart­ment employee who had taken them home with­out autho­riza­tion… [T]he sec­re­tary called the Federal Bureau of Investigation once he learned of the theft.”
UPDATE 4:40 PM: Axe has a killer piece for Military.com today on Iraq vets’ strug­gle to adjust to post-war life.

I’ve got a story in today’s New York Times. Here’s how it starts:
The case against Dan Kincaid was strong. A home­owner in north­ern Boise, Idaho, had iden­ti­fied Mr. Kincaid, 44, as the per­son who had bro­ken into his sub­ur­ban house. But eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony isn’t always rock solid, and Mr. Kincaid was refus­ing to talk. The police wanted more. So they searched Mr. Kincaid’s BlackBerry e-mail-capable phone elec­tron­i­cally, and found all the evi­dence they needed.
“Just try­ing to find a way out of this neigh­bor­hood with­out get­ting caught,” Mr. Kincaid wrote to his girl­friend on Aug. 1, 2005, shortly after he had been spot­ted. “Dogs bark if I’m between or behind houses. … ”
“Cops know I have a blue shirt on,” he con­tin­ued. “I need to get out of here before they find me.”
Faced with his e-mailed admis­sion, Mr. Kincaid agreed to a deal with pros­e­cu­tors over that crime and a string of oth­ers. In February, he pleaded guilty to five counts of grand theft, resist­ing arrest and bur­glary.
“We seized his phone,” said Detective Jeff Dustin of the Boise Police Department, “and instead of a jump shot, this case is a slam dunk.”
Cellphones are every­where: 825 mil­lion were sold last year, accord­ing to the mar­ket research firm IDC. And the phones do more than just dial num­bers. With expanded mem­o­ries, increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated orga­nizer tools and sharper cam­eras, they are play­ing ever larger roles in the lives of almost every­one includ­ing crim­i­nals. Drug deal­ers, rapists and mur­der­ers across the coun­try have been caught based, at least partly, on the elec­tronic gad­gets they carry around.
But extract­ing clues and leads from mobile elec­tron­ics is no cake­walk. Unlike per­sonal com­put­ers, 90 per­cent or more of which use the Windows oper­at­ing sys­tem, cell­phones rely on a con­fus­ing jum­ble of soft­ware that varies from man­u­fac­turer to man­u­fac­turer and even phone to phone. Data is often hid­den or encrypted. And as long as a phone is con­nected to its cel­lu­lar net­work, there is always a chance that its call his­to­ries and text mes­sages will be erased, delib­er­ately or oth­er­wise.
Read the rest here.