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The Los Angeles Police Department is one of the biggest and better funded law enforcement agencies in America, but its deputy chief isn’t happy about how it uses mobile technology. After flying up to Cupertino for the Apple Global Police Summit last October, John McMahon, who also doubles as the department’s chief information officer, heard from international colleagues about how they were using iPhones and other Apple tools to help both cops on the beat and investigators chasing leads.
There was a presentation from a German police agency on an iPhone app that collected fingerprints and sent them to a centralized repository. New Zealand’s national police department talked about an app called OnDuty, which connected to the National Intelligence Database and made it easy to search data including locations, license plate numbers and individual criminal histories. Those and other stories of Apple tech in policing led McMahon to conclude that American departments were “woefully behind” other nations when it came to using smartphones for law enforcement. “This became painfully obvious to me from that event,” says McMahon.
Though existing vendor commitments and financial restrictions inside the LAPD might be prohibitive, McMahon says he’s keen to make Apple tech, in particular the iPhone, core to officer operations. Now the LAPD, alongside the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, have welcomed Smudge, the developer of the New Zealand OnDuty iOS app, to California in the hope they can collaborate on something similar for U.S. agents.
Reuben Bijl, cofounder and managing director at Smudge, tells Forbes from California this week that he’s been on ridealongs with police agencies across California to learn more about how they operate and what tweaks the app needs before officers can use it. In the near future, he’s hoping to have the app in the hands of American first responders, helping them get the information they need on the ground regardless of what kind of event they’re racing towards.
“If you’re a frontline responder, you turn up to whatever job comes in, whether it’s a public event or suicides in someone’s house… and you might turn up to three or four of those in one day,” Bijl says. “Working out how we build tools that support those jobs… is what we’re thinking about.”
McMahon says he’s hopeful of making what he saw at the Apple event last year a reality for his force, with both OnDuty and the German agency’s fingerprint-taking app. But he admits it takes time to get such major tech rollouts going. Of Smudge’s tech, he says, “It’s on our roadmap,” but the agency has a “few too many things on our plate” to move forward imminently. McMahon’s fellow CIO at Orange County, Dave Fontneau, previously told Forbes he was also keen to acquire more Apple tools for his officers beyond iPhones, including the use of Vision Pro virtual reality devices for access to surveillance feeds and CarPlay to replace in-car laptops.
Smudge isn’t your average cop contractor, though. It’s an app developer but one that prides itself on consultancy and going deep into organizations to understand what they need. Outside of the New Zealand Police, Smudge has also worked with Coca-Cola to build a sales force automation tool, which is now in use across Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.
With 40 employees, it remains a small business, but with the help of cops high up the food chain like McMahon, the New Zealand coders could find themselves more established on the international scene imminently.
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FBI Investigating Possible China Hack Of Presidential Campaign Officials’ iPhones
A security provider for a Presidential campaign informs the FBI of evidence of hacking on the iPhones of two senior officials. The agency is pursuing a lead related to a Chinese hacking group known as Salt Typhoon.
If the iPhones have been hacked, it marks a significant escalation in cyber espionage on the U.S., as direct device breaches can provide hackers with a wealth of information, from encrypted messages to photos and contacts. China, meanwhile, denies it is involved in any hacking, let alone any targeting either Harris or Trump.
Stories You Have To Read Today
Chinese cyber spies have also been able to breach the phone of president elect Donald Trump’s lead criminal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, according to sources who spoke with ABC News. The hackers managed to access texts and audio recordings, the outlet reported.
Canadian authorities have arrested a man suspected of breaches of as many as 165 customers of cloud provider Snowflake, including AT&T and Live Nation. Alexander “Connor” Moucka was apprehended in October, Bloomberg reports.
Winner of the Week
Tigran Gambaryan, a former IRS agent and a Binance compliance exec, is a free man after spending months in a Nigerian prison, where he’d been accused alongside his employer with laundering $35.4 million. Last month, Nigeria dropped the charges against Gambaryan, who’d played significant roles in major cryptocurrency-based crimes, including the one targeting the dark web marketplace Silk Road.
Loser of the Week
Amazon has confirmed a breach of employee data after an individual claimed to have pilfered information from the retail giant on a hacker forum. The stolen data includes staff name, work contact information and the location of their workplace, according to 404 Media.
