Obtaining A User Name And Password - State Of Michigan: Fill & Download for Free

From every angle, social media is anathema to privacy. The very founding concept of paleolithic AOL chatrooms and Usenet newsgroups, and later Facebook, MySpace, and the earliest blogging sites was to provide a forum for people to share with each other. People shared ideas, humor, emotions, preferences, prejudices, priorities, and often misguided attempts at profundity. Newer sites simply broadened and deepened the sharing – Twitter users share commute times and coffee temperatures, Tumblers share memes galore, and Instagramites share a wealth of doctored photographs.We learned things about the people in our world, and they about us. Thanks to social media, we now know that if our nearest coworker were a tree, she would be a willow, and the celebrity she believes that she most resembles is Angelina Jolie. We also know that Shirley’s kids are honor students and that Tom’s brother was just released from prison (early, for good behavior), that Jeffrey lives and dies with his Eagles and that Sandra is so, so, so sad at the plight of shelter animals. Importantly, we know when people are leaving town and how long they will be gone. We know if they come into money. We learn about their families and their vulnerabilities. We learn about drinking and drug use, sexual promiscuity, and even crimes like DWI or hit and run. We see pictures of their kids, their cars, their vacations, and their homes.All of this sharing may help create communities, but it also destroys privacy. The bikini-clad body that is perfectly appropriate on the beach at St. John or Captiva may undermine the respect an employee has worked hard to earn from superiors, subordinates, and peers at the office who may view the vacation pictures on Facebook. The same may be true for pictures of a drinking party among friends. Too much published information can and will present obstacles when circumstances change and a spouse sues for divorce, or a rival is seeking an edge for a promotion at work. We all know that kids can be the cruel, and your insistence on wearing mouse ears at a Disney theme park may reach the attention of your children’s classmates, and their parents. Criminals trawl social media constantly, looking for vulnerabilities and vacations, pinpointing easy targets.Operators of various social media outlets are well aware that their profits may increase as we expand our willingness to share personal information about ourselves, and much of the business model development for social media sites is designed to coerce, cajole, trick, taunt, or tease us into revealing more information about our lives and our thoughts and opinions. Who are your friends? What discounts interest you? You “liked” the last Vin Diesel movie, will you like the next one? What is your relationship status? Who do you write to? Who do you poke? Won’t you download the mobile app so we can see where you are when you access our site? Your friends have downloaded our app. Why won’t you? We will ask you again in two hours.Every bit of information we disclose is another databite to be mined and measured, sorted and sold. Online transactions provide even more opportunities, because a purchase through a social media site hits the trifecta for the site owner. With a purchase, the site registers our activity, our expenditure, our degree of interest in a good or service and an entire category of goods or services (opening our wallet demonstrates significant interest), our bank, our credit card information, our shipping address, our online ID, and our passwords. In addition, the social media site may trumpet the sale to our friends attempting to induce additional transactions. And beyond this extraordinary information bounty, the social media site likely received a financial kickback from a sale made from its platform. Moreover, the data mining industry attempts to review every transaction and every posting in which we engage in order to be able to maximize the profit potential of every piece of information disclosed by that transaction or posting.For this reason, social media is not simply a collection of online places that allow private information to escape, but social media sites are organized to draw as much participation and information out of us as possible. Like casinos built without sunlight or clocks so as to encourage your further play, the social media sites and data mining industry study online behavior and build manipulation machines designed to entice you to remain engaged and to divulge information. A search engine site may not care whether you own a particular make or model of car or that you baked cookies last night, but it cares that you told them about your car and your cookies. They make money from aggregating car owners and cookie bakers and selling information to companies who can exploit that information.Until recently, there has been very little counterbalance to the siren’s call of revealing everything on social media or to the tricks and manipulations that the online media companies employ to make sharing easy, satisfying, and seemingly so necessary. Certainly there are authors writing jeremiads both in and out of the mainstream media who will despair about the morality of kids today, or about the solipsistic adults who believe that each workout or restaurant meal is worth recording for posterity and circulating to wide circle of “friends.” There seems to be an absence of concerted opposition to this kind of activity. Schools and workplaces do not appear to actively discourage sharing in social media, except to prevent a student from bullying another, or to caution workers not to release company trade secrets. Governmental restrictions are spotty at best, except for the intelligence services, judiciary, and some government agencies.In short, prior to 2013, legislatures and regulators in the United States appeared to be more concerned about the data they could glean from social media than protecting privacy of the average citizen in the online world. Much of the rest of the industrialized world has a very different viewpoint about personal information than that we experience in the United States. In Europe, Canada, and other countries across the world, protection of each citizen’s private information is considered to be a human right, secured by statute and enforced by government and private causes of action. In the United States, by contrast, only certain classes of information are protected under federal law – financial transactions, health care transactions, and information regarding children under the age of 13 – while nearly all other data is considered to be fair game for any business or government agency that chooses to collect, store, and use the information.The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general have been the traditional protectors of online privacy for lightly-regulated industries like social media. But through much of the development of social media and socially-oriented Internet sites, these enforcement agencies have tended only to enforce the privacy policies that a site chose to publicize. If a social media site had claimed not to gather certain information, but it indeed gathered that information, then the FTC would assert claims upon that site. However, if the social media site had a vague privacy policy that never clearly disclosed all of the information it gathered, or if the site gathered and sold massive amounts of personal data from its users, and the site revealed its behavior in its privacy policy, then no enforcement action would be initiated because the site was not breaking any known laws. (The exception to this rule seemed to be the 2006 ruling against Choicepoint, costing the company $10 million in civil penalties for providing personal information to identity thieves.) In other words, for most personal data about people, their activities, and their transactions, it seems that a social media site would not be regulated for use or abuse of this data, only for misrepresenting what data was collected and how such data was used. Deep intrusions of privacy may be allowed, as long as the site doesn’t directly misrepresent what it is doing.The FTC has moved beyond this position during the past three years by using its powers to enforce privacy policies on social media sites to sue transgressors, and then to force the transgressive sites into settlements that include a long-term consent order permitting the FTC to have a tighter grip on the site’s policies. For example, in November 2011, the FTC claimed that Facebook had lied to consumers by repeatedly stating that personal information would be kept private, while repeatedly allowing that personal information to be shared and made public. In settling this claim, Facebook agreed to a 20-year consent order protecting its member’s privacy in more specific ways. That agreement mandates that Facebook receive explicit consent of its users before disclosing private information. Following up on this, in September 2013, the FTC announced an inquiry into whether Facebook’s proposed new privacy policies, disclosed in August 2013, violated the 20-year consent agreement. In its proposed new policies, Facebook was planning to use its members’ names and pictures in advertising products the members had “liked” or for which they had given a favorable comment, and the new policy provided that Facebook automatically assumed that the parents of teenage Facebook users had granted permission for their children’s names to be used in advertising. The original FTC claim relating to an allegedly misleading privacy policy has thereby enabled the FTC to exercise much greater influence into Facebook’s future treatment of consumer data. The FTC also has obtained similar 20-year consent orders in place with Twitter, MySpace, and Google.State breach notice laws affecting social media privacy have some relatively consistent elements and some experimental elements. These laws address the way that a social media company must behave after a breach of security relating to a site-user’s personal information. Over 45 U.S. jurisdictions have some sort of data breach notice law. While these statutes come in a variety of flavors – some include obligations triggered by simple exposure of personal data while others are not triggered until the exposed data is at risk of theft and misuse – their basic function is the same: if a company exposes/loses certain kinds of data relating to individuals, then the company must provide notice of the loss to the data subjects (and often to law enforcement and credit services). Nearly all of these laws would apply to companies collecting personal data about their users and failing to appropriately guard the data from unauthorized breach or disclosure. However, social media sites are considered to provide a special class of service where the essential purpose of the enterprise is to enable people to provide information about themselves to a larger public. The social media companies only facilitate this exercise. Therefore, in the regular course of using social media, people are exposing their own private data, even health-care data, financial information, and information about their children, and self-exposure will not trigger the state breach notice laws. It is, however, likely that a failure by a social media company to protect a user's private data beyond that company’s privacy settings would trigger these laws. For example, if a Texas social media user had set her account to "friends only," and the social media site exposed her account more broadly, then the site would be subject to state law breach notice requirements.A social media site might have trouble meeting its obligations with respect to breaches because for each user whose account was compromised, the site must determine if the exposure included private and legally protected subject matter as defined in each applicable statute. Rather than undertake this Herculean task, the site may determine simply to notify all its members about the mistake, whether or not such notice is mandated by a particular state law. Of course, as with other enterprises, social media companies that accept credit card payments or otherwise keep customer financial account data are expected to protect this data and are obligated to notify customers where financial data was compromised.As social media grows in importance in many American lives, states are tackling specific aspects of privacy intrusions that are raised in the news and that capture the imagination of legislatures and the public. For example, the concern about disclosure of personal information on social media sites has manifest in the field of worksite protections. In the past two years, a new wave of privacy laws has been sweeping state legislatures; at this writing, 12 states currently have laws specifically restricting employers from demanding access to their employees’ social media sites when those sites are not fully public. (The states that have passed these laws are Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.) Nearly all of these laws were passed in 2013, and other legislatures are currently considering legislating similar employer restrictions. One of the newest and broadest of these laws, passed in September 2013 and signed into law in New Jersey, prohibits employers from seeking access to “a person account,” such as a friends-only account at Facebook. Further, the law prohibits employers from “shoulder surfing” or making an employee access a personal account while management watches, from requiring an applicant or employee to change the privacy settings on a restricted account to a less-restrictive setting so that the employer can access it, or by forcing the employee to accept an employer’s “friend” request. The law also prohibits an employer from retaliating or discriminating against a job applicant or employee for refusing to provide log-in information to the employer, for reporting violations of this law to the New Jersey Commissioner of Labor, or from testifying or participating in an investigation into a violation of the law.The New Jersey law contains exceptions for financial service firms that are required by statute to monitor employees’ social media communications. Similarly, in September of 2013, Illinois amended its social media password law to exempt the financial services sector, because many companies in this sector – banking, securities sales, and insurance – are required to monitor certain employee’s correspondence of all types with customers or prospective customers. Most states with laws in this space have broad definitions of the type of sites protected. For example, the recently passed Nevada statute classifies a social media account as “any electronic service or account or electronic content, including, without limitation, videos, photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, electronic mail programs or service, online services or Internet website profiles.” The penalties for these laws vary widely, with California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and Oregon creating administrative remedies; Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Utah, and Washington providing a private right of action (some with penalty caps); and Arkansas, Nevada, and New Mexico not addressing remedies at all in their statutes. Other aspects of the laws vary by state. Oregon bans colleges from asking for social media passwords. Washington allows employers to be granted access to social media sites when making factual determinations in the course of conducting an investigation. New Mexico’s restrictions only apply to job applicants and not to employees.Despite these laws, employers are still allowed to review social media pages that are available to the general public, and employees may volunteer access to their social media accounts or may choose to “friend” work associates, including their superiors. Taking advantage of these voluntary actions does not violate any of the new social media forced access laws. However, because of the recent trend toward increasing the protection accorded to personal online accounts and communications, employers should document how they obtained any social media information regarding employees how they obtained access to it. The trend toward increased protection is not uniform, though, and highlights uncertainty in a number of jurisdictions as to the degree to which privacy in social media should be protected. Most states have not approved such protections, and those that have passed a password protection law are inconsistent with respect to penalties, definitions, and the scope of protections.California is taking steps to protect the privacy of some social media users from users’ own poor judgments. In autumn 2013, California enacted a law that would require social media sites to allow young registered users to erase their own comments from the sites. This is a first step in the United States toward the “right to be forgotten” that has been debated in Europe over the past decade. Teens who may have posted embarrassing statements will now have the right to clear those statements from the site’s memory banks. The mechanism for enforcement has not as yet been determined, but we do know some of the limitations of the law. The statute only covers the teen’s own posts and not posts made by others. A child can only erase his or her own statements, not the comments, “like” buttons, or other posts surrounding those statements. (A new case has ruled that use of the “like” button on social media is constitutionally protected speech. Bland v. Roberts, Case No. 12 – 1671, 4th Cir., September 18, 2013.) A teen cannot erase pictures of him or herself that others have posted, or statements about that teen that third parties posted, no matter how embarrassing or offensive those pictures or statements may be. The Library of Congress is currently archiving public tweets on Twitter, and other third-party sites archive social media data. These archive sites are not covered by the California law. And from a policy standpoint, is there a downside to permitting young bullies, racists, and fraudsters to eliminate the evidence of their statements? Although some of this speech may have legal implications and may be required in court proceedings, under the new California law these statements may be required to be deleted.In an equally bold move, in 2013 the California legislature also addressed the broad concern of consumers who are being silently tracked by software over the Internet. Tracking tools used by social media are one of the ways these sites derive revenues, capturing user’s behavior and then selling targeted advertising designed to match or appeal to the type of behavior a specific user exhibits. Many sites use persistent beacons, cookies, and other tools that follow a person’s web usage and send information about that user’s visits and habits to the site or other third parties. Some Internet browser programs are now including anti-tracking technology, permitting a user to attempt to reject these monitoring tools or at least to advise sites that use the tools that this user does not wish to be tracked in this way. California’s new law will not force sites to stop tracking consumers, and it will not even force those sites to acknowledge and follow “do not track” instructions received by consumer’s browser. Instead, the California law requires companies to disclose whether the sites will honor “do not track” instructions from their users. Presumably, it is thought that Internet surfers will avoid sites that do not honor such requests. It is also likely that the California attorney general’s office, which fought for this law, will be posting a “naughty and nice” list of companies which will and won’t respect their user’s wishes not to be tracked. This law follows several years of failure by Internet sites (including social media) and privacy advocates to agree on a method permitting people to opt-out of being tracked online. It is unlikely that the California law will itself cause major changes in social media company behavior, but this is the first statute to advance the conversation on tracking of private online movements, and it could lead to further action by legislatures across the country.Led by the states, the United States is developing laws and regulations to protect certain aspects of people’s information on social media. As social media sites evolve to make the dissemination of information easier, our society is beginning to recognize the problems inherent in such dissemination, and the use and protections to which such information is entitled. Both the FTC and state legislatures are taking steps to protect the American public from inappropriate intrusions on their privacy through social media – even if they are only protecting us from our own poor judgment.

The US 2016 Presidential Campaign was mainly influenced by hackingHere's a look at hacking incidents during the 2016 presidential campaign and Russian meddling in the election.Timeline:September 2015 - The FBI contacts the Democratic National Committee's help desk, cautioning the IT department that at least one computer has been compromised by Russian hackers. A technician scans the system and does not find anything suspicious.November 2015 - The FBI reaches out to the DNC again, warning them that one of their computers is transmitting information back to Russia. DNC management later says that IT technicians failed to pass along the message that the system had been breached.March 19, 2016 - Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta receives a phishing email masked as an alert from Google that another user had tried to access his account. It contains a link to a page where Podesta can change his password. He shares the email with a staffer from the campaign's help desk. The staffer replies with a typo - instead of typing "This is an illegitimate email," the staffer types "This is a legitimate email." Podesta follows the instructions and types a new password, allowing hackers to access his emails.June 12, 2016 - During an interview on British television, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that the website has obtained and will publish a batch of Clinton emails.June 14, 2016 - The Washington Post reports hackers working for the Russian government accessed the DNC's computer system, stealing oppositional research on Donald Trump and viewing staffers' emails and chat exchanges. The Kremlin, however, denies that the government was linked to the hack, and a US official tells CNN that investigators have not yet concluded that the cyberattack was directed by the Russian government.June 15, 2016 - A cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC posts a public notice on its website describing an attack on the political committee's computer network by two groups associated with Russian intelligence. According to the post, two Russian-backed groups called "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear" tunneled into the committee's computer system. In response, a blogger called Guccifer 2.0 claims that he alone conducted the hack, not the Russians. As proof, he posts internal DNC memos and opposition research on Trump. Furthermore, Guccifer 2.0 claims to have passed along thousands of files to WikiLeaks. Trump offers his own theory on the origins of the attack: suggesting in a statement that the DNC hacked itself to distract from Clinton's email scandal.July 22, 2016 - Days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks publishes nearly 20,000 emails hacked from the DNC server. The documents include notes in which DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz insults staffers from the Bernie Sanders campaign and messages that suggest the organization was favoring Clinton rather than remaining neutral. Wasserman Schultz resigns in the aftermath of the leak.July 25, 2016 - The FBI announces it has launched an investigation into the DNC hack. Although the statement doesn't indicate that the agency has a particular suspect or suspects in mind, US officials tell CNN they think the cyberattack is linked to Russia.July 27, 2016 - During a press conference, Trump talks about Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and calls on hackers to find deleted emails. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," says Trump. Newt Gingrich, a Trump surrogate, defends Trump in a Tweet, dismissing the comment as a "joke."August 12, 2016 - Hackers publish cell phone numbers and personal email addresses for Nancy Pelosi and other members of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.September 1, 2016 - During an interview with Bloomberg News, President Vladimir Putin says that he and the Russian government have no ties to the hackers. He says that the identity of the culprit or culprits is not as important as the content of the leaks, and ultimately the hackers revealed important information for voters.September 22, 2016 - Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff, ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, issue a joint statement declaring that based on information they received during congressional briefings, they believe that Russian intelligence agencies are carrying out a plan to interfere with the election. They call on Putin to order a halt to the activities.September 26, 2016 - During a presidential debate with Clinton, Trump questions whether the DNC cyberattack was carried out by a state-sponsored group or a lone hacker. "It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."October-November 2016 - Over the course of a month, WikiLeaks publishes more than 58,000 messages hacked from the account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman.October 6, 2016 - DCLeaks, a self-described collective of "hacktivists" seeking to expose the influence of special interests on elected officials, publishes a batch of documents stolen from Clinton ally Capricia Marshall. DCLeaks is later identified as a front for Russian military intelligence.October 7, 2016 - The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence on Election Security issues a statement declaring that the intelligence community is "confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions." According to the statement, document releases on websites WikiLeaks and DCLeaks mirror the methods and motivations of past Russian-directed cyberattacks.November 29, 2016 - A group of Democratic senators sends a letter to President Barack Obama calling on intelligence agencies to declassify information about "the Russian Government and the US election." Sources later tell CNN that new intelligence has been shared with lawmakers suggesting that Russia's purpose for meddling in the election was to sway voters towards Trump, rather than broadly undermining confidence in the system.December 9, 2016 - The Washington Post reports the CIA has determined that Russian hacking was conducted to boost Trump and hurt Clinton during the presidential campaign. The Trump transition team dismisses the CIA's findings. President Obama asks intelligence agencies to review the hacking incidents in 2016 and other cyberattacks on political campaigns dating back to 2008. The agencies are asked to deliver their findings before Obama leaves office on January 20. A Russian foreign ministry spokesman expresses skepticism about the review and asks US investigators to share their evidence of government-sponsored cyber espionage. Meanwhile, media critics question the Post's reliance on anonymous sources for the CIA report and advise readers to be wary of claims in the article due to the lack of publicly available evidence to support the spy agency's conclusions.December 10, 2016 - John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham and Jack Reed issue a joint statement calling on Congressional Republicans and Democrats to work cooperatively on securing future elections and stopping cyber attacks.December 11, 2016 - Sources tell CNN that although US intelligence agencies share the belief that Russia played a role in the computer hacks, there is disagreement between the CIA and the FBI about the intent of the meddling. While the CIA assessment shows that the Russians may have sought to damage Clinton and help Trump, the FBI has yet to find proof that the attacks were orchestrated to elect the Republican candidate, according to unnamed officials. Furthermore, some sources say the hackers also infiltrated the Republican National Committee's computers.December 12, 2016 - CNN reports that Russian hackers accessed computer accounts of Republican lawmakers and GOP organizations. A source with knowledge of the investigation says that even though hackers breached the GOP computers, they opted not to release documents en masse.December 13, 2016 - The New York Times publishes a detailed account of the DNC's delayed response to initial warnings in September of 2015 that its network had been infiltrated by hackers. The report outlines how phishing emails and communication failures led to a sweeping cyberattack. The story also lays out evidence that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were linked to Russia. A second article in the Times chronicles the hacking of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, housed in the same building as the DNC. According to the report, Guccifer 2.0 stole tens of thousands of documents and offered them to reporters in districts where Democratic candidates were engaged in competitive races for House seats.December 29, 2016 - President Obama issues an executive order with sanctions against Russia. The order names six Russian individuals who allegedly took part in the presidential campaign hacking. Additionally, 35 Russian diplomats are ordered to leave the US within 72 hours.January 3, 2017 - Julian Assange of WikiLeaks says that the Russian government did not provide him with the hacked DNC emails during an interview with Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel.January 3-4, 2017 - In a series of tweets, Trump questions the US intelligence community's claims that the Russian government interfered with the election. He alleges that intelligence officials have delayed a scheduled meeting with him but sources tell CNN that there has been no change to the schedule. Trump also cites Assange's interview to back his assertion that a rogue hacker, not the Russian government, may have meddled in the election.January 5-6, 2017 - Intelligence officials meet separately with Obama and Trump to present the results of their probe into cyber espionage during the presidential campaign. After the president and the president-elect are briefed, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence releases a declassified version of its classified report on Russian meddling. According to the report, hackers did not breach voting machines or computers that tallied election results but Russians meddled in other ways. Putin ordered a multifaceted influence campaign that included spreading pro-Trump propaganda online and hacking the DNC and Podesta. Bracing for a possible Clinton win, Russian bloggers were prepared to promote a hashtag #DemocracyRIP on election night. Paid social media users, aka "trolls," shared stories about Clinton controversies to create a cloud of scandal around her campaign.January 6-7, 2017 - Trump issues a statement after his meeting with intelligence officials. In the statement, he acknowledges that the Russian government may have been linked to the DNC hacking but declares that cyberattacks did not impact the outcome of the election because voting machines were not breached. In a series of tweets, he repeats that hacking did not affect election results and says that he wants to improve relations with Russia.March 10, 2017 - In an interview with the Washington Times, Trump ally Roger Stone says that he had limited interactions via Twitter with Guccifer 2.0 during the campaign. He says the exchanges were "completely innocuous." The following day, the New York Times publishes its own interview with Stone, in which he says that his communication with Guccifer 2.0 took place after the DNC hack, proving there was no collusion with the Trump campaign to arrange the cyber attack.June 1, 2017 - In public remarks, Putin says that hacking during the presidential election campaign may have been carried out by patriotic Russian citizens who felt compelled to respond to perceived slights against Russia from America. Putin says, however, that the Russian government played no role in the cyber attacks. During an interview days later, Putin says that a child could have easily hacked the American presidential campaign.June 5, 2017 - An investigative website, the Intercept posts a report that the Russian government coordinated a spear-phishing attack on computers at an American voting machine company and compromised at least one email account. The article is based on an NSA memo that was leaked to the Intercept. Hours after the story is published, the source of the leak is identified as a government contractor named Reality Leigh Winner, 25. She is charged with transmitting classified information.June 21, 2017 - During a Senate hearing, a Department of Homeland Security official says that hackers linked to the Russian government targeted voting systems in up to 21 states.July 25, 2017- A bipartisan bill limiting Trump's power to ease sanctions against Russia passes in the House by a 419-3 vote. The measure also imposes new sanctions on North Korea and Iran.July 27, 2017 - The Russia sanctions bill passes in the Senate 98-2. White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci tells CNN that the president may veto the bill and negotiate a tougher deal.July 28, 2017 - In a reversal, the White House announces that Trump intends to sign the sanctions bill into law.July 30, 2017 - Putin announces that 755 employees at US diplomatic missions in Russia will be ousted from their posts in response to sanctions.August 2, 2017 - Trump says the Russia sanctions bill is "seriously flawed" but he signs it anyway.September 6, 2017 - In a blog post, Facebook announces that more than 3,000 advertisements posted on the social network between June 2015 and May 2017 were linked to Russia. The Washington Post reports that the ads came from a Russian company called the Internet Research Agency.September 22, 2017 - The DHS notifies select states that hackers targeted their election infrastructure before the vote on November 8, 2016. Although vote-counting systems were not impacted, computer networks containing voter info may have been scanned by Russian hackers. Some states reported attempts to infiltrate their computer systems.October 3, 2017 - CNN reports that a number of the Russia-linked Facebook ads were geographically targeted to reach residents of Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump defeated Clinton by a narrow margin in both battleground states.October 12, 2017 - CNN publishes an investigation of Russian trolls who posed as a group of Black Lives Matter activists during the presidential campaign. They used a variety of platforms including Tumblr and Pokemon Go to reach voters.July 13, 2018 - The Justice Department announces indictments against 12 members of the Russian intelligence agency, GRU, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation. The indictment accuses the Russians of engaging in a "sustained effort" to hack emails and computer networks associated with the Democratic party during the 2016 presidential campaign.July 16, 2018 - During a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump says that the Russian president was "extremely strong and powerful" in his denial that his country interfered with the 2016 election. Trump says, "I don't see any reason why it would be Russia." One day later, he clarifies his remark. "The sentence should have been, 'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia,'" Trump says. "Sort of a double negative."

Undercover secret service Agent characters and able to perform successfully, has to do mainly in his belives that his actions activities us based on morale justifiable reasons to undertake missions in order to protect life of his fellow citizens against evils.Related terms:Charles A. Sennewald, Curtis Baillie, in Effective Security Management (Sixth Edition), 2016ExampleConsider a case in which the Security department contracts for the placement of an undercover agent in a warehouse for the purpose of gathering information on possible internal theft. The undercover agent’s primary employer is a contract service firm. The agent receives a salary from them as well as a regular paycheck, like every other warehouse employee, from the company that owns the warehouse. For a period of time some useful intelligence is obtained, but after a while the undercover agent becomes personally involved with other warehouse employees and the reports become valueless. Even though the agent wishes to remain employed in the warehouse, services can be terminated forthwith without violating the agent’s rights to job security, because the real (and primary) employer is the firm that sent the agent to the warehouse and is still paying the undercover salary (although it may be less than the warehouse salary).If, on the other hand, the Security department hires an applicant directly into the warehouse to serve as an undercover agent, that person would be entitled to some job protection and could not be summarily removed from the job. The use of contractual services has some very definite advantages.ect Behind the Keyboard, 2013Undercover and Informant OperationsUndercover operations in cybercrime investigations obviously will include use of electronic communication. Undercover (UC) agents email, text, and chat with suspects online to communicate. This can be in the form of the UC assuming the identity of a child to investigate child molestation cases or perhaps the UC will assume an identity of a high-tech criminal to investigate a hacker. Either method can require face-to-face interaction between the UC and criminal suspect. This interaction and investigative method will apply similarly to civil investigations.A great example of a successful undercover operation began in 1999 with the Internet Service Provider (ISP), Speakeasy Network, in Seattle, Washington. The Speakeasy Network was hacked from Russian IP addresses. The suspects contacted Speakeasy, identified themselves, and offered to not disclose Speakeasy’s flaws if Speakeasy would pay or hire them. The hackers also claimed to now possess thousands of passwords and credit card numbers from Speakeasy customers. These hackers, Alexey Ivanov and Vasily Gorshkov, continued to hack and extort businesses in this manner.The FBI conducted an intensive undercover operation, in which both Ivanov and Gorhkov agreed to enter the United States to discuss their hacking skills with FBI undercover agents. Through audio and video recorded conversations, keyloggers, sniffers, search warrants, undercover business fronts, and even setting up an undercover computer network for them to hack into, both were convicted on federal felony counts of computer fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy.All undercover operations carry an inherent risk to personal safety. As an investigative method, it also carries a need for intensive resources and skilled UC operators. The effectiveness of a successful undercover operation cannot be overstated. A benefit to being able to speak openly to a suspect while assuming the role of a criminal or conspirator allows for intelligence to be gathered exponentially faster than physical surveillance. Confessions made to an undercover are just as valid as a confession made to a uniformed officer. Future suspect activities, something not easily obtainable otherwise, can be spoken directly to the UC to which future operations can be planned.Less extreme undercover activities can be conducted requiring no more than a phone call. If a specific time and place has been identified as a source of criminal activity, a simple phone call to the suspect will place the suspect at the location at a given time. The phone call need be no more than false pretenses in which the suspect is identified by voice or name. The phone call may not definitely place the suspect at a keyboard; however, tying the suspect to the location by voice is a strong indication. For criminal activity in progress, such as a victim receiving harassing emails from a previously identified location through an IP address trace, a call can be made while the activity is occurring to identify the suspect by voice.If a suspect email address has been identified, emails can be sent to the suspect with a tracking code that obtains the local IP address of the suspect, and then sends the date and time of the email being accessed along with the IP address of the suspect computer. These tracking codes are invisible to most users and email programs, but pose risk of compromise should the code be identified by the suspect through a warning from anti-virus software.Undercover operations coupled with surveillance may also be necessary in order to obtain evidence not able to be obtained otherwise. If a suspect obscures his IP address through any means, without having physical access to the system used in crimes, close contact with the suspect may be required. This contact could be in the form of befriending the suspect in hopes of having information disclosed to the UC. Even only if the manner of hiding the IP address was disclosed, investigative methods to counter the IP address hiding method could be conducted.Informant operations pose the same risks to safety and compromise of the investigation with the added danger of informants being untrained. Informants havevaried reasons for cooperating with law enforcement and not every reason is trustworthy. In many cases, informants are developed from cases, in which the arrested suspects agree to cooperate in consideration for lesser charges. Such was the case of Hector Xavier Monsegur, in June 2011, when he was arrested by the FBI. Monsegur agreed to work for the FBI as an informant, and in doing so, helped the FBI successfully investigate multiple hackers as conspirators. Although Monsegur did agree to cooperate, he also pleaded guilty to a multitude of computer crime charges.Probably the biggest benefit to using informants in a cybercrime investigation is being able to take advantage of this past history and contacts with other cybercriminals. Their reputations may be known and few, if any associates would suspect their long-time partner-in-crime to be working for law enforcement. Undercover officers enter without a history or known accomplices, unless an informant is used to vouch for the undercover officer.Dario Forte, Andrea de Donno, in Handbook of Digital Forensics and Investigation, 2010Investigations of Mobile SystemsInvestigations used to be carried out exclusively by people. In the pure spirit of investigation, you started from information obtained through an undercover agent followed by operations involving trailing suspects and intercepting ordinary mail. Without the help of technological systems, these investigations tended to last much longer than their more modern counterparts.Today, the initiation of an investigation may involve, in addition to verbal information, an anomalous bank record, an image from a surveillance camera, or of course highly visible crimes such as theft or murder.The first phase of the investigation involves interviewing people who may have relevant information and continues with monitoring the means of communication of suspects or others associated in some way with the case. In addition to the traditional telephone, there are other monitoring points such as electronic mailboxes, places visited by the suspect, Telepass accounts (devices used for automatic highway toll payment), credit card accounts, and other financial operations.Nowadays, investigations are supported by software that is customized to meet different requirements. The investigator enters all the data available on a subject into the interception system and the server performs a thorough analysis, generating a series of connections via the mobile devices involved, the calls made or received, and so on, providing criminal police with a well-defined scheme on which to focus the investigation, and suggesting new hypotheses or avenues that might otherwise be hard to identify. Obviously, thanks to the support of the NSP, the data can be supplemented with historical information or other missing data such as other mobile devices connected to a given BTS on a given date and time. Data can also be provided for public payphones, which are often used to coordinate crimes. Again, thanks to a connection with the NSP, it is possible to obtain a historical record of telephone calls made and the location of the payphone with respect to other mobile devices. The same sort of record may also be obtained for highway travel using Telepass (conventional name for automatic wireless toll payment), including average speed and stops.Having historical data of various kinds relating to an investigation accessible in a database can greatly assist the initial examination of a newly acquired mobile device. By extracting all telephone numbers in the phonebook of a mobile device seized during a search and entering names and numbers into the electronic system, digital investigators perform powerful analysis even in the initial phases of the investigation thanks to cross-referencing capabilities. For instance, investigative tools support advanced entity and relation searches, including the nicknames from phonebooks to locate additional related activities. In addition, some investigative tools enable digital investigators to perform traffic analysis, including georeferenced data and diagram generation as shown in Figure 10.2.Figure 10.2. Cellular telephone tracking software, showing the relative movements of two mobile devices over a given period of time.It is thus very important to have investigation software that can quickly import data online (secure and confidential connection with the MC) or from optical media, and that offers flexibility in subsequent processing.Charles A. Sennewald, Curtis Baillie, in Effective Security Management (Sixth Edition), 2016Coordinate with Security on Major or Important InvestigationsThere are occasions when a criminal case would be impossible to conclude successfully without the cooperative effort of both the private and public sectors. A dramatic example of such a case occurred in Los Angeles. Investigators for a chain of department stores learned that a large number of employees and nonemployees were working together in a concerted effort to remove merchandise from the department store’s warehouse. Most of the participants were identified, videos were taken of some of the theft activity, and an undercover agent was successfully placed in the midst of the group by the Security department to provide a flow of intelligence. The department store then went to the local authorities (in this particular case, the District Attorney’s office) for assistance.In a coordinated effort, the following actions occurred. A small electrical supply and service store was obtained about two miles from the warehouse. It was wired for voice recordings. A panel truck equipped with a 16-mm motion picture camera (before the sophisticated video cameras we have today) was parked behind the store. Two investigators from the District Attorney’s office posed as owners of the store and one manned the camera vehicle. Department store investigators secretly marked the kind of merchandise the undercover agent had indicated would be stolen the next day. Through the undercover agent, word was passed to the thieves that there was a new “fence” in the area (the electrical supply store). The department store provided the money to buy the goods. In a short time, regular trips were made to the back door of the “fence,” and investigators were buying stolen merchandise marked by other investigators the night before. The transactions were visually and audibly recorded by the hidden camera.A grand total of 27 culprits were either indicted and arrested, arrested and referred to juvenile authorities, or, in those cases in which a public offense could not be established, discharged from the company.A case of this complexity and magnitude could not have been resolved so successfully had it not been for the cooperation between private security and law enforcement. Criminal investigations provide frequent opportunities for this effective interaction.In Hiding Behind the Keyboard, 2016The Intended AudienceLaw enforcement officers, criminal investigators, and civil investigators are the intended audience simply because they usually confront covert communications in their positions. In actuality, many of these professionals may not even be aware of the covert communications that are already occurring in their investigations. When you do not know what you do not know, you will almost always miss critical evidence and information.Throughout this book, both these terms “suspects” and “targets” are used for the persons involved in covert communications you wish to investigate. The term target is used not as a political or tactical point other than a “target” being the subject of your investigation. A target can be a terrorist, criminal, or corporate spy for whom you want to uncover covert communications.As a practical matter, every person fitting within this intended audience should be well-versed in technology as it relates to communication. The criminals and terrorists of today exploit every means to communicate covertly and anonymously, and most involve technology. To delay learning the methods being used is to delay effectively investigating your targets.NoteHiding Behind the KeyboardJust because your targets use complex methods of covert communication does not mean you cannot use the same methods! Witnesses, informants, agents, undercover officers, and other persons should use secure communications to protect their identities and the information exchanged.Duration of Relevance for This GuideSimilar to Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard, this book has been written as a guide to outlast technology advances. Although technology changes constantly by employing the principles in this guide, you should be able to transfer what becomes old technology to the latest technology. It is mastering concepts and principles that are most important in becoming a great investigator.As for the technical information in the book, similar to other technologies, what is possible today may not be possible tomorrow and conversely, what is impossible today may be possible in the future. Simply some things get harder, and other things get easier. Either way, you are reading a book with tools to deal with both situations.Read full chapterView PDFChristopher Burgess, Richard Power, in Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, 2008IntroductionAs the Haephrati case discussed in Chapter 1 illustrates, the theft of trade secrets and other intellectual property has expanded beyond classic industrial age espionage (largely focused on the turning of insiders) to include information age espionage (e.g., hacking into networks or using targeted malware). And it is also true, as has been previously noted, that the severity of the insider threat is often disproportionately emphasized in relation to the severity of the outsider threat.Nevertheless, much illegal activity, particularly in the arenas of economic espionage and trade secret theft, is still predicated on, or instigated by, insiders of one kind or another. Furthermore, this is true regardless of whether the criminal behavior is cyber-based or grounded in the physical world.Four stories from the United States, Korea, and Canada (all of which broke within a period of several weeks in 2006) underscore both the threat from inside, and its diverse manifestations:“The U.S. attorney in Detroit … announced charges of stealing trade secrets against three former employees of an auto supplier, saying economic espionage stabs at the heart of the Michigan economy and is a growing priority among his federal prosecutors. The former employees of Metaldyne Corp., arraigned in U.S. District Court after a 64-count grand jury indictment was unsealed, are accused of stealing the Plymouth, Mich., company’s trade secrets and sharing them with Chinese competitors. They each face up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 if convicted. Metaldyne, which has 45 plants in 14 countries, makes a wide range of auto parts for engines, drive trains and chassis systems. The company has annual sales of $2 billion and about 6,500 employees.” (Trade-secret theft charged in Detroit, Baltimore Sun, 7-6-06)“US authorities last night charged three people with a cloak-and-dagger scheme to sell secrets from Coca-Cola to soft drink archrival PepsiCo, which helped in the investigation …. The offer of ‘confidential’ information from Coca-Cola sparked an FBI investigation with an undercover agent offering $US1.5 million dollars in cash. The investigation was launched after PepsiCo turned over to its cola rival a letter in May from a person identifying himself as ‘Dirk,’ who claimed to be employed at a high level with Coca-Cola and offered ‘very detailed and confidential information,’ a US Justice Department statement said. According to authorities, an FBIundercover agent met on June 16 with Dimson, who was posing as ‘Dirk’ at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. Dimson gave the agent ‘a brown Armani Exchange bag containing one manila envelope with documents marked ‘highly confidential’ and one glass bottle with a white label containing a liquid product sample,’ the statement said.” (FBI lays charges on Coke secrets, The Australian, 7-6-06)“About a half of Korea’s top technology firms have suffered from leaks in industrial know-how one way or another over the past three years, although the companies have increased preventive measures, a report showed. According to the report released the Korea Industrial Technology Association on Monday, 11 of 20 Korean firms that had invested the most in research & development have suffered financial damage due to technology leaks in the past three years. When taking into account smaller firms, 20.9 percent out of 459 firms said that they suffered from industrial espionage cases during the period. The rate is 6.4 percentage points higher than three years ago, meaning that firms have become more vulnerable to technology theft …. As Roh pointed out, about 65 percent of the reported cases were found to involve employees from former companies. Only 18 percent and 16 percent of the cases involved current employees and subcontractors of the firms, respectively… The survey was done on 459 firms with in-house R&D departments.” (Cho Jin-seo, Half of Top Tech Firms Suffer Leaks, Korea Times, 6-19-06)“Intelligence files reportedly suggest that an estimated 1,000 Chinese agents and informants operate in Canada. Many of them are visiting students, scientists and business people, told to steal cutting-edge technology. An example being touted as copied technology is China’s Redberry—an imitation of the Blackberry portable e-mail device, created by Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion Ltd …. Juneau-Katsuya said the former Liberal government knew of the espionage, but were too afraid to act. ‘We didn’t want to piss off or annoy the Chinese,’ said Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asian desk. ‘(They’re) too much of an important market.’ However, he argued that industrial espionage affects Canada’s employment levels. ‘For every $1 million that we lose in intellectual property or business, we lose about 1,000 jobs in Canada,’ he said.” (Robert Fife, Government “concerned” about Chinese espionage, Catch Up On Full Episodes For Free News, 4-14-06)Without a robust, twenty-first century Personnel Security program, it won’t matter how much or how well you invest in Information Security, or how fool-proof and high-tech your Physical Security has become, because the perpetrators that will take advantage of your weak or nonexisting Personnel Security program will already be inside both your physical and cyber perimeters.In this chapter, we will highlight some of the most important aspects of what should be in your enterprise’s Personnel Security program, including an overall checklist of the top 20 controls mapped to ISO, and guidelines for background checks (Figure 10.1 illustrates the “hit ratio”—the information discrepancies uncovered during background screening), data, termination procedures, and a travel security program.Figure 10.1. Background Checks Reveal Vital Insights That Offer a Subtle Return on Investment—They Mitigate Risk and Limit LossesView chapterPurchase bookMarius-Christian Frunza, in Introduction to the Theories and Varieties of Modern Crime in Financial Markets, 20163.1 Focus on DerivativesThe role of derivatives is less studied and less well known in the money-laundering process. A basic laundering mechanism is the execution through a brokerage house of a long and short position on the same asset (buying and selling the same future contract or buying a call option and a put option or buying and selling a vanilla swap). The broker will pay the client for the position ending up in the money with clean money and will cancel in his records the out of the money transaction to avoid any audit trail. Technically only the transaction fee and the broker’s margin are costs for the client dealing with illegal funds, but in this way they manage to obtain proof of origin for the funds.Bank of Credit and Commerce International— The First Money LaunderingBackgroundFounded in 1972 by the Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi, and having Bank of America as the main shareholder, BCCI became at one time the biggest private bank in the world. Incorporated in Luxembourg BCCI operated from London and Karachi. From the 1980s the bank became a main platform for global money laundering and was under scrutiny from many regulators and law enforcers.Derivatives and money launderingA well-known example is that of the Bank of Credit and Commerce Internationala and its derivatives arm Capcom led by Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar, who explained the above scheme to undercover Agent Robert Mazur from US customs in 1988. Agent Mazur testified how Akbar used pairs of long short trades that was called “mirror image” trading to launder huge sums of money. Mirror image trading involved two accounts controlled by the same person and the bank was buying contracts for one account while selling an equal number from another account. Since both accounts are controlled by the same individual any profit or loss is effectively netted. One main advantage of this strategy is that being a zero-sum game it can pass under the radar of auditors among many millions of dollars worth of legitimate transactions, thereby making it untraceable.bTriviaUntil its fall in 1991, the BCCI served many dictators and criminal groups including the ex-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Medelin Cartels. The CIA also held accounts with the bank to fund the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army, the forerunner of modern Talibans.The mirror trading scheme was also favored by a regulation concerning bunched orders of derivatives, which are orders entered by an account manager that are executed as a block and allocated after execution to customers so the trades may be cleared and for post trade allocation. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulation 1.35(a1) allowed a derivatives broker to not identify his client’s trade allocations during a trading session. The broker could do this in the post trade without specific rules. This specific regulation allowed all types of misconduct in the derivative world including money laundering.The regulation in the United States changed in 2012 when the CFTC imposed new rules on time limits for bunched orders, requiring that bunched orders be allocated as soon as practicable after execution, but also providing absolute deadlines by which allocation must occur. For trades that are cleared, allocation must occur sufficiently before the end of the day the order is executed to identify the ultimate customer for each trade. Account managers are forbidden from giving any account or group of accounts consistently favorable or unfavorable treatment relative to other accounts, in order to reduce the risk of mirror trades.If the cleared derivatives market requires strict monitoring of its participants, the OTC derivatives market offers more maneuver for launderers.3.1.1 OTC DerivativesOTC derivatives are bilateral agreements between two counterparties, that are not traded or executed on an exchange. In some cases, OTC deals can be registered via an exchange without the margin mechanism. Compared to the listed derivatives which are standardized, the OTC products are tailored depending on the needs of the two counterparties. The warning signals in these type of transactions are in the following situations:•The features of the OTC derivative are very different from the cleared versions. A swap with a premium at initiation is generally not a sign of confidence. The Goldman’s Sachs swap offer to the Greek treasury is one example of a derivative used as for malpractice. But in reality this type of instrument can hide other fund exchanges in a laundering scheme.•There is no economic basis for explaining that derivative. As an example a small retail enterprise based in Wales with all costs and revenues indexed in GBP, enter in an OTC Forex forward on YEN/CAD. In these cases, the OTC derivative can justify a one-time payment or flow. Not being marked to market regularly the settlement can occur whenever a fund needs to be transferred.•The valuation of the derivative is sophisticated and uses models which are based on traders’ opinions (Level 3 assets). An example can be a Swiss trading company entering in an OTC accumulator option2 on chrome prices with a Russian metal exporter. As the chrome market is illiquid with not many derivatives listed, the pricing of such a product is almost impossible. This ambiguity can be used to justify a fund transfer between the two firms, part of a laundering scam.Figure 1 shows a simple example of money laundering using OTC derivatives. A criminal group owning a company seeded with illegal funds makes an investment with a specialized firm. This firm does not need to be a financial company, and could easily be a trading house or an importer exporter. The investment firms purchase in OTC exotic derivative products from offshore firms. Sporadic settlements based on “mark to model” (“mark to mob”) justify a fund transfer to the offshore firm. The offshore firm has the same OTC derivative back to back with another counterparty controlled by the crime group, but with a clean record. The same “mark to mob” valuation justifies the transfer of funds to the counterparty resulting in clean funds. The very same scheme is used currently by firms to reduce their tax bills in countries with high taxation rates.Welcomehttps://www.sciencedirect.com/user/login?returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Ftopics%2Fcomputer-science%2Fundercover-agentFigure 1. Money-laundering OTC derivatives: Placement: A criminal group owning a company seeded with illegal funds makes an investment with a specialized firm. This firm does not need to be a financial company, and could easily be a trading house or an importer exporter. The investment firms purchase OTC exotic derivative products from offshore firms.Layering: Sporadic settlements based on “mark to model” (“mark to mob”) justify a fund transfer to the offshore firm. The offshore firm has the same OTC derivative back to back with another counterparty controlled by the crime group, but with a clean record.Insertion: The same “mark to mob” valuation justifies the transfer of funds to the counterparty resulting in clean funds.View chapterPurchase bookPolice, Sociology ofPolice as a formal institution of social control, organized within the framework of the nation state, emerged during the course of the eighteenth and …https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767020040H.-J. Albrecht, D. Nogala, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 20012 Determining the SubjectAt first glance and seen from the surface it seems rather trivial to determine who and what constitutes ‘the police.’ One would expect that the police as a public institution is represented by (sworn) officers, i.e., representatives of the state and its government, who are (often) specially trained professionals and are invested with certain powers (like the authority to search or arrest a person). Usually this ‘apparent’ kind of police will appear in public as officers on the beat, a crew in a patrol car, behind a desk in a police station, or as plain-clothes detectives, doing investigations in the field. This is the common and popular image (in the Western world) of what police actually are, transmitted by the media and supported by occasional ordinary encounters. From time to time this picture is widened by the appearance of riot police in full gear, underlining the state's authorization and capability of using legitimately physical force against disobedient citizens or rioting crowds.When one looks again at who and what constitutes police, the semblance becomes more complicated: on the level of involved actors it becomes apparent that a good portion of the workforce employed by police consists of civilian staff, like secretaries or the clerks in the forensic laboratories; some sworn officers, such as staff who are responsible for conducting statistical analysis of criminal incidents or running a computer program for matching data, are rarely out in the field, while certain field officers, like undercover agents or specialists in charge of surveillance of telecommunication, often do not act openly as police. Furthermore there are other state agents who, having similar powers of investigation or intervention, perform certain functions of policing, but are not seen or labeled as ‘police.’ One might think here of custom officers, secret agents, public health inspectors, or prison guards. Still others appear in a policelike guise but are clearly not officers (at least lacking their full powers): city wardens, commercial guards and patrols, hired investigators, vigilante organizations like the ‘Guardian Angels,’ bodyguards, stewards in a football stadium, or bouncers.As professionals trained to use force legitimately in the name of the state's power, police share this somewhat exclusive right with the military and other law enforcement officials (prison, customs). But on the level of routine work processes, this distinguishing feature is a rather rare event compared to the overall picture of police duties. Instead, research has shown that a considerable part of the modern police workload is not at all focused on crime control and investigation of criminal cases, but consists of responding to general emergency calls, mediating conflicts, regulating motor vehicle traffic, and communication with other institutions or agencies like social services, insurance companies, etc.Although it might be clear from a commonsense point of view, what ‘police’ actually are—basically that formal institution which is vested with the powers and resources to respond to criminal acts or public order disturbances and calls itself ‘police’—the subject in question gets more diverse, the more we see it from a perspective of a peculiar organized social activity rather than as a matter of institutionalism. Thus a true ‘sociology of policing’ would cover a wider area and embrace more organizations than the initial ‘police studies.’But even from an institutional approach one has to speak of ‘the police’ either from a very abstract level or from a single case point of view only. Besides the common similarities in terms of historical developments, organizational models, practical strategies and tactics, and legal accountabilities, every country's police system has its own particularities and unique arrangement of forces.It should not be overlooked that police as a subject of sociological interest is linked in many ways with other social systems, all of them carrying their own, often overlapping, bodies of literature: as an instrument of executive governance ‘the police’ can be seen as a segment of the sociology of the state. Its quality of being an important part of the criminal justice system and its more or less explicit legal bindings does make it a component of the sociology of law. Last but not least, on the level of empirical studies there are clear ties to the field of organizational sociology.View chapterPurchase bookCopyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V.