Defining Technology-Facilitated Abuse

 

This month, we’re defining Technology-Facilitated Abuse. The research-based understanding of this type of abuse is harmful acts or courses of conduct facilitated through digital means that can compromise victims’ privacy and cause them to fear for their safety, such as cyberstalking, nonconsensual pornography, swatting, doxing, and sextortion. Personal harm from digital abuse extends far beyond the digital realm. These acts can cause serious psychological distress and damage relationships with family, friends, and partners and disrupt educational and professional pursuits. Sextortion — A form of cyber extortion featuring an online attack on victim systems, for example through ransomware, in which offenders demand sexual images, sexual favors, or other things of value in exchange for stopping the attack. Nonconsensual pornography — Distribution of nude or sexually explicit images or videos of an individual without consent. Cyberstalking — Repeated use of electronic communications to stalk a person or group. Doxing — Public release of private and sensitive personal identifying information about an individual without their consent. (The word “doxing” is derived from “documents.”) Swatting — False report of an emergency to trigger an emergency response, specifically deployment of a SWAT team, to a location where no emergency exists. Recent NIJ resources to further expand understanding of this term — and help us systemically determine action — include: Ranking Needs for Fighting Digital Abuse: Sextortion, Swatting, Doxing, Cyberstalking and Nonconsensual Pornography Source RAND Report: Criminal Justice Strategies for Combating Nonconsensual Pornography, Sextortion, Doxing, and Swatting  LEARN MORE

7 Precautions You Can Take When Making Online Purchases

From the Anchorage Police Department, here are some precautions to take when making purchases online:

• Never go to the meet alone. Have at least one other person with you. Make sure another individual, who is not with you, knows where you are, what you are doing, and any details you have about the other party you are meeting.
• Meet in a public place that has cameras and a lot of foot traffic such as a superstore parking lot.
• Meet during a busy time of day – not late at night or early in the morning when there are not many other people around.
• If the party you are meeting arrives in a vehicle, jot down the license plate and a description of the vehicle.
• Pay attention to the physical attributes of the people you are meeting with in case you need to give a detailed description of them to the police later.
• Only deal in cash. Checks and cashier checks can easily be forged. Pay attention to the money you accept. Make sure it looks and feels the way money should.
• Should you be threatened, follow the instructions of the suspect(s), leave the area as soon as possible, and call 9-1-1 as quickly as you can.

Things I Didn’t Know You Could Buy Online

While surfing around Amazon I came across this "Jumbo 20 Feet Inflatable Outdoor and Indoor Theater Projector Screen" I find the reviews interesting.  I start with the "Five Star" and then go immediately to the most dissatisfied reviewer and compare them.   The person who really loved it said, "Love the size and ease of setup. Worth every penny paid! It's hard to fit back in the bag so it would probably be best to get a container to put it in. The quality seems sturdy and the product is true to the advertised dimensions."  The poor reviews concerned poor workmanship and one thought it didn't work well in an area with a lot of light (I figured that part out before I read the review).  

With both the best and worst reviews, I click on the reviewer.  Often, I find the person is a constant complainer.  Nothing they bought at Amazon worked well or was as they expected.  Where would you use this?  Anyway, a weird thing on Amazon.  

If you see something weird for me to look at, leave a comment.

Oh yea, I'm an Amazon Affiliate, if you click on the picture or the link they might someday pay me something. 

Exercise Reveals Advantages Artificial Intelligence Gives in All-Domain Ops

 April 1, 2021 | BY Jim Garamone , DOD News

U.S. Northern Command hosted a global information dominance exercise and the results point to the tremendous advantages the Defense Department would receive by applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to all-domain information, Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck said yesterday.

VanHerck, who commands NorthCom, detailed the results of the exercise during a virtual meeting with the Defense Writers' Group.

All 11 combatant commands participated in the exercise, which was based on a global scenario involving two peer competitors. "What we were looking to do is show the incredible value of information and how information can be used today," he said.

This is especially true if commanders can take information from all domains — undersea, space, cyberspace, air, land, sea and share it through machine-learning artificial intelligence, he said. This would serve to make data and information available in a timely manner to produce space for decision makers. 

The decision makers could be at the tactical level all the way up to the president of the United States, VanHerck said. "You can use it in competition day-to-day; you can use it in crisis for de-escalation and, obviously, in conflict for 'defeat or deny,' if needed," he said.

The exercise pointed to the fact that some of these capabilities are already available to commanders. "I did [this exercise] with the intent to bring all the combatant commands together to place a demand signal … on the department to move quicker down the path of domain awareness, information dominance and decision superiority," VanHerck said. 

Spotlight: Artificial Intelligence

The general said the capability in DOD is called Joint All-Domain Command and Control – JADCC. "We need to go faster; we can't go slow for legacy processes to take years to build capabilities," he said. "That was my intent: to show that capabilities exist today to go down this path."

The exercise really demonstrated the need for military global integration. "All competition through conflict today is global in nature, and the tools gave us the ability to collaborate with all the combatant commands near real-time across all domains," he said.

VanHerck also addressed the command's efforts to combat COVID-19. "We're down to one hospital that we're currently embedded in right now in Kingman, Arizona. When that mission ceases, we'll have no more [military personnel health] providers embedded in local hospitals," he said. "I'm encouraged by that. That's a good trend that we're not having the mission to provide support to local and state authorities for the treatment of COVID patients."

Northern Command is preparing to deploy more service members to provide the Federal Emergency Management Agency with vaccine support. There are currently 25 military teams with 3,562 personnel deployed at multiple locations across 14 states providing vaccination support. On March 30, the teams gave more than 60,000 vaccinations. "We just went over 1.6 million vaccinations as we continue to move forward," the general said.

The command will place four more teams in the first week of April. 

Register for "Advancing Fire Scene Investigations with Field Portable Technologies"

 

Webinar Date: April 6, 2021, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern This multi-year effort evaluated the application and limitations of field portable Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) systems. The testing included three bench-top burns, nine flashover burns and 139 fire scenes with hundreds of samples processed. The process for collecting fire scene samples aligned with industry standards to include canine alerts, Photoionization Detector (PID) confirmation, evidence collection in fire debris containers, and GC/MS sampling of area of interest. The findings offer insight into the future of obtaining lab quality GC/MS data from the fire scene. Canine detection teams have been in use by fire investigators since the late 1980s. They have tremendous sensitivity in searching many environments. If properly trained, they have very high rates of accuracy for the detection of ignitable liquid residues at even badly damaged fire scenes. While 100% accuracy cannot be claimed, they are accurate enough to provide a high degree of probability for the investigator to advance the investigation and recover samples for lab confirmation (by GC/MS per ASTM E1618). However, the canine cannot confirm specific products and the investigator can’t offer a canine alert as proof of the presence of an ignitable liquid. It was the intent of this study to ultimately combine the use of canines, PID detection, and field portable GC/MS. This project set out to use solid phase micro-extraction (SPME), a process that has been successful in trapping a variety of volatiles from both air and water. It requires minimal handling as the analyte is absorbed directly onto the SPME fiber (a specialized polymer), which is then inserted into the heated injection port of the GC/MS to be driven off. SPME was approved for use in sampling fire debris under ASTM E2154. It requires no contact with any solid substrate and is very sensitive, but the small fiber could be easily over-saturated, producing distorted distributions of multi-component mixtures. To minimize that problem, the sampling time for the fiber’s exposure had to be adjusted to the concentration of hydrocarbon vapors in the environment to be sampled. This is easily accomplished with the ppbRae 3000 PID as it was sensitive, fast, and accurate in low ppm-ppb range. This was the method used in nearly all of the fire tests included here. The use of GC/MS requires highly specialized analytical systems that, until recently, could be found only in fixed lab installations. It was the intent of this study to see if recently introduced field-portable GC/MS systems could provide laboratory quality data to fire scene investigators. This has become necessary as public forensic labs have found themselves badly backlogged and have severely reduced the time and personnel available for fire debris analysis. This has resulted in delays that have seriously hampered fire investigations. This study was an attempt to establish whether field-portable GC/MS systems currently on the market could provide accurate lab results to field investigators. REGISTER

DOD Awards $53.7 Million Contract to Ortho Clinical Diagnostics

March 31, 2021

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On March 31, 2021, the Department of Defense (DOD), on behalf of and in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), awarded a $53.7 million contract to Ortho Clinical Diagnostics to increase production capacity of COVID-19 antigen and antibody test kits and associated VITROS® Systems test analyzers. The VITROS® Systems test analyzers can be installed in laboratories across the nation to process tests and provide same-day results. 

This is an industrial base expansion effort which will allow Ortho Clinical to establish domestic production capability of its COVID-19 antigen and antibody test kits and VITROS® Systems test analyzers at its Rochester, New York facility.  This effort will allow the company to increase production capacity from 1.8 million to 6.7 million tests per month and establish production capacity of 25 test analyzers per month by April 2022.    

The DOD’s Defense Assisted Acquisition (DA2) Cell led this effort in coordination with the Department of the Air Force’s Acquisition COVID-19 Task Force (DAF ACT). HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Developmental Authority (BARDA) funded this effort through the Health Care Enhancement Act (HCEA) to support domestic industrial base expansion for critical medical resources.

DOD Awards $146.77 Million Contract to Puritan Medical Products to Increase Domestic Production Capacity of Foam Tip Swabs

March 29, 2021

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On March 26, 2021, the Department of Defense (DOD), on behalf of and in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services, awarded a contract with a not-to-exceed value of $146.77 million to Puritan Medical Products to increase domestic production capability of foam tip swabs used in critical COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

The global increase in COVID-19 cases continues to impact diagnostic test manufacturers and the supply chains that support specimen collection and testing performance. This industrial base expansion effort serves as a modification to the previous Puritan contract.  This award will allow Puritan to conduct renovations to the facility and prepare the space for equipment that will increase the company’s total production capacity to 250 million foam tip swabs per month in Orlinda, Tennessee by February 2022.

The DOD’s Defense Assisted Acquisition (DA2) Cell led this effort in coordination with the Department of the Air Force’s Acquisition COVID-19 Task Force (DAF ACT).  This effort was funded through the Health Care Enhancement Act (HCEA) to support domestic industrial base expansion for essential medical resources.