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Police use of electronic warrant ("e-warrant") technology has increased significantly in recent years. E-warrant technology allows law enforcement to submit, and magistrate judges to review and approve, warrant applications on computers, smartphones, and tablets, often without any direct communication. Police officers report that they favor e-warrants over their traditional, paper counterparts because they save officers a significant amount of time in applying for warrants by eliminating the need to appear in-person before a magistrate. Legal scholars have almost uniformly praised e-warrant technology as well, arguing that use of these systems will increase the number of warrants issued throughout the United States and decrease police reliance on warrant exceptions, a seemingly ideal outcome given the strong constitutional preference for warrants. However, nearly all of this favorable commentary is premised on the assumptions that (1) convenience is a worthy goal of the criminal justice system, and (2) more warrants necessarily mean better police work and greater fidelity to the Fourth Amendment, assumptions that quickly wither under careful scrutiny. Indeed, research shows that the inconvenience of the traditional warrant system incentivizes careful police work and disincentivizes the submission of constitutionally dubious warrant applications. Ewarrants, however, by prioritizing convenience, upend this system and increase the likelihood that police will submit deficient warrant applications and that magistrates will not carefully review them. Worse, the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that has arisen around warrants over the last fifty years makes it extremely unlikely that, once issued, these hastily issued e-warrants will be deemed invalid or any resulting evidence suppressed. In short, e-warrants amplify all of the existing problems with the warrant system and exacerbate the imbalance of power between police and citizens. Jurisdictions should sharply curtail police use of e-warrant technology by imposing new restrictions on how and when e-warrant systems can be used, and by creating real-time conversation and transparency requirements in situations in which e-warrants are deemed preferable over their traditional counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article has two aims. First, it explains how automated decisionmaking can produce unexpected results. This is a problem long understood in the field of industrial organization, but identifying its effects in policing is no easy task. The police are a notoriously difficult institution to study. They are insular, dislike outsiders, and especially dislike critical outsiders. Fortunately, we have the benefit of a decade’s worth of experimentation in police use of automated decision-making and the resulting political backlash against some of these uses. As a result, some large urban police departments have undergone external investigations to see whether tools like predictive policing or individual criminal risk assessments are biased, ineffective, or simply too costly despite their benefits. One of these recent reports, studying the use of acoustic gunshot detection software in Chicago, provides a window into one type of police automation. This leads to the Article’s second observation. Automation is not just a set of tools that the police use; it changes the environment of policing in unexpected ways. The increasing use of automated tools in policing has generated some widely shared criticisms, but they focus primarily on the flaws of the technologies used. The training data in facial recognition algorithms may be biased along lines of race, gender, and ethnicity. Risk assessments for gun violence may, in truth, be poor guides for police intervention. These claims are singularly technology-focused. Accordingly, errors and inefficiencies merit technological improvements. Even calls for bans on technologies like facial recognition are responses to the technology itself. As Chicago’s experience with acoustic gunshot detection technology demonstrates, however, automation serves not just as a tool for the police, but also leads to changes in police behavior. These changes in police conduct are documented in a 2021 report from the Chicago Office of Inspector General, and they are noteworthy. If automation unexpectedly changes police behaviors, these changes have implications for how we understand policing through the lens of inequality and unaccountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No longer does the field of law enforcement rely solely on human cognition and capability as drones have become first responders, responding to emergency calls with a drone rather than a human officer. Drone technology can transform police work, just as it has package delivery and military strategy. These drone officers allow for higher law enforcement efficiency, safer communities, and even saved lives. However, they also raise civil liberty concerns given that the drones have the power to track vehicles and people without consent, and they can collect and store video records of everyday life, reducing expectations of privacy. This article will discuss the use of autonomous drones and robotic law enforcement officers in the United States and the safety, liability, and constitutional implications thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the various surveillance practices involved in the use of social media for communication and investigation purposes by UK police forces. In doing so, it analyses internal policy documents and official guidance obtained through freedom of information (FOI) requests sent to 46 police forces in the United Kingdom. This analysis finds that UK police forces advise their staff to simultaneously engage in both surveillance and counter-surveillance strategies in their use of social media as a policing tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the revolutionary potential of predictive policing has often been exaggerated, this novel policing strategy nonetheless implies something substantially new: the underlying methods of (crime) data analysis. Moreover, these police prediction tools matter not only because of their capacity to generate near-term crime predictions but also because they have the potential to generally enhance police-related data crunching, ultimately giving rise to the comprehensive datafication of police work, creating an ongoing drive for extensive data collection and, hence, surveillance. This paper argues that because of its enablement of crime data analysis in general, predictive policing software will be an important incubator for datafied police work, especially when executed via data mining platforms, because it has made police authorities aware that the massive amounts of crime data they possess are quite valuable and can now be easily analyzed. These data are perceived to be even more useful when combined with external data sets and when processed on the largest possible scale. Ultimately, significant transformative effects are to be expected for policing, especially in relation to data collection practices and surveillance imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on empirical research on training webinars, interviews, and promotional material from Vigilant Solutions, this paper investigates the surveillance regime enabled by platform policing: the implementation of cloud-based platforms, designed and run by private corporations, that provide mass surveillance-driven simulations for a range of police operations, including predictive policing, targeted surveillance, and tactical and strategic governance. Building on Amoore's (2016) work on "cloud geographies," this paper argues that the platform model embodied by Vigilant Solutions involves multivalent processes of de- and reterritorialization in which new technological and datalogical spaces are formed and these erode older societal boundaries of private, public, and state. Specifically, Vigilant Solutions leverages its multi-sided platform business model through the deterritorializing, cloud-based concatenations of surveillant technologies. It then argues that the resultant reterritorialized cloud space, which is accessible through its Vigilant Investigative Centre (VIC) platform, fuses mass surveillance data from diverse private, public, and state sources in a simulated geography. Further, the VIC furnishes to law enforcement an array of data analytics that exploits this cloud geography to enable a boundary-crossing surveillance regime of association analysis and proximal suspicion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policing, particularly in the United States, is being progressively datafied. This process has a historical trajectory that is crucial to the analysis and critique of new platform-based security architectures. Predictive policing has already attracted considerable attention, partially due to its seemingly novel fusion of predictive analytics and police work. Hyperbolic early claims--often mobilizing science fiction imagery--that the future could, in fact, be predicted, pointed towards utopic/dystopic imaginaries of seamlessly integrated control. Predictive policing is, however, increasingly only one component of cloud-based data systems that are coursing through police activity. The imaginary of these transformations can be analysed through the security imaginary of policing as a process of real-time data transmission, perpetually self-adjusting and self-augmenting through machine calculation. The historical contextualization of this imaginary suggests useful vectors of inquiry that position platform policing squarely within the mechanisms of contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the concept of evidence-based policing has become commonplace in academic and practitioner-minded literature. The law enforcement community acknowledges the benefits of using data to guide policing strategy, yet still takes the acceptance of data analysis for granted when integrating it into the daily operations of police departments. How can data analysis be implemented in a way that provides value to police department managers and patrol officers delivering service? This article examines the start-up of a crime analysis unit in a large, Midwest police department in 2015. Using a case study analysis, the article examines some of the early successes and the potential pitfalls of a new crime analysis unit. Specifically, the article will examine the importance of culture change, the recruitment and selection of crime analysts, and the ongoing effort to provide value to department customers, as well as the community. The case study will focus academically on how change occurs within police organizations, but moreover on practical considerations that will be of great benefit to practitioners wishing to start a crime analysis unit or to improve an existing one. The article will add to the field of crime analysis by combining the insights of practitioners and the perspective of academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years demonstrate a growing use of algorithmic law enforcement by online intermediaries. Facilitating the distribution of online content, online intermediaries offer a natural point of control for monitoring access to illegitimate content, which makes them ideal partners for performing civil and criminal enforcement. Copyright law has been at the forefront of algorithmic law enforcement since the early 1990s when it conferred safe harbor protection to online intermediaries who remove allegedly infringing content upon notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Over the past two decades, the Notice and Takedown (N&TD) regime has become ubiquitous and embedded in the system design of all major intermediaries: major copyright owners increasingly exploit robots to send immense volumes of takedown requests and major online intermediaries, in response, use algorithms to filter, block, and disable access to allegedly infringing content automatically, with little or no human intervention. Algorithmic enforcement by online intermediaries reflects a fundamental shift in our traditional system of governance. It effectively converges law enforcement and adjudication powers in the hands of a small number of mega platforms, which are profitmaximizing, and possibly biased, private entities. Yet notwithstanding their critical role in shaping access to online content and facilitating public discourse, intermediaries are hardly held accountable for algorithmic enforcement. We simply do not know which allegedly infringing material triggers the algorithms, how decisions regarding content restrictions are made, who is making such decisions, and how target users might affect these decisions. Lessons drawn from algorithmic copyright enforcement by online intermediaries could offer a valuable case study for addressing these concerns. As we demonstrate, algorithmic copyright enforcement by online intermediaries lacks sufficient measures to assure accountability, namely, the extent to which decision makers are expected to justify their choices, are answerable for their actions, and are held responsible for their failures and wrongdoings. This Article proposes a novel framework for analyzing accountability in algorithmic enforcement that is based on three factors: transparency, due process and public oversight. It identifies the accountability deficiencies in algorithmic copyright enforcement and further maps the barriers for enhancing accountability, including technical barriers of non-transparency and machine learning, legal barriers that disrupt the development of algorithmic literacy, and practical barriers. Finally, the Article explores current and possible strategies for enhancing accountability by increasing public scrutiny and promoting transparency in algorithmic copyright enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This quantitative, case study explores the importance of IT, CIS, Computer Science, and Communications as interdisciplinary degree programs with criminal justice curriculum. The researchers examined the future technology skills needed by police agencies, the current recruiting trends by police departments and compared these needs with current four year, accredited criminal justice programs. The researchers then examined the perceptions of criminal justice major students and their assessment of the importance and impact of technology in law enforcement today and in the near future. The data demonstrates how criminal justice students' perceptions allude to the importance and relevancy of technology in law enforcement and how CJ programs are not adequately preparing them for future policing needs. In addition, police agencies are not effectively recruiting technology officers to meet current and future technological needs for law enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the fourth amendment of Technology and Individuals Privacy Rights related to the implications of zero-day vulnerabilities for domestic investigations. Topics discussed include exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability, increase in the cyber and computer crimes; increase in the risk of hacking victims, role of the law enforcement for reducing risk of computer crime, usage of zero-day vulnerabilities against international targets; and examining the technical background.

Police forces and law enforcement agencies in many countries are continuously trying to optimize the use of technologies in policing and law enforcement. Efforts are being made to remove existing technological, legal and organizational obstacles to create more opportunities of promising technologies, both existing and new. This contribution describes the results of a survey among 46 police forces and other law enforcement agencies in 11 countries. Their experiences with policing technologies and their needs and preferences in this regard are described. The prevalence and satisfaction of existing technologies, including wiretapping, fingerprints, DNA research, database coupling, data mining and profiling, camera surveillance and network analyses were investigated. Legal, technological and organizational obstacles for the use of technology in policing were mapped and the extent to which policing technologies are evaluated and yield success stories was investigated. The main obstacles, according to the respondents, are insufficient financial resources and insufficient availability of technology. One in four organizations is lacking any clear, appealing success stories and half of the respondents indicated they were not performing any evaluations on the effectiveness of using particular technologies in policing. As a result, the information available on whether technologies in policing are actually working is very limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy is an emerging and important area of law. Never has it been as important as it is now for the Australian community to have confidence that the information their governments collect is being adequately used and protected. This is largely due to the advanced ability for people to access information, which has resulted in a heightened risk for information to spread widely, and at a speed not envisaged even five years ago. With recent privacy breaches, such as the inadvertent release of the personal information of approximately 10,000 detainees on the Commonwealth's Department of Immigration and Border Protection's website1 the protection and use of personal information is a critical consideration for all governments. This article will examine the recently passed Information Privacy Act 2014 (ACT) by the ACT Legislative Assembly and will compare the Information Privacy Act 2014 (ACT) with the Privacy and Data Protection Bill 2014 (Vic)2 recently tabled in Victoria which brings together privacy and law enforcement data security legislation. This article will compare governmental reports handed down in Victoria and the ACT, which addressed similar issues of data security and protection and made similar recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the development, merits and application of predictive coding in judicial opinions in the U.S. Topics discussed include the merits of linear predictive coding against human review, significance of computer-assisted technology that lower cost of predictive coding, and impact of predictive coding on legal market.

In this paper, we employ Extended Cognition as a background for a series of thought experiments about privacy and common used information technology devices. Laptops and smart phones are now widely used devices, but current privacy standards do not adequately address the relationship between the owners of these devices and the information stored on them. Law enforcement treats laptops and smart phones are potential sources of information about criminal activity, but this treatment ignores the use of smart devices as extensions of users' cognitive capability. In Philosophy of Mind, Extended Cognition is a metaphysical theory about the relationship between consciousness or cognitive activity and various external tools or aids that agents employ in the service of cognition. Supporters of Extended Cognition argue that mental activity must be understood as taking place both within the brain and by way of tools such as a logician's pen and paper, a mathematician's calculator, or a writer's word processing program. While Extended Cognition does not have universal support among philosophers of mind, the theory nevertheless describes how agents interact with their 'smart devices.' We explore the the implications of taking Extended Cognition seriously with regard to privacy concerns by way of a series of thought experiments. By comparing the differences in expectations of privacy between a citizen and the government, between an employee of a corporate firm, and between citizens alone, we show that expectations of privacy and injury are significantly affected by taking the cognitive role of smart devices into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the use of Technology Assisted Review (TAR) in relevance to three court cases including Moore v. Publicis Groupe, Global Aerospace v. Landow Aviation, and Kleen Products v. Packaging Corporation of America. It analyzes the benefits for legal community from the use of TAR and describes the standards that are set to use the TAR.