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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday September 06 2016, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the sniffing-out-technology dept.

CNN reports that URL, the porn-sniffing dog, is the newest crime-fighting tool at the Weber County Sheriff's office with a nose that could help put away some of the country's most predatory and dangerous criminals. URL (pronounced Earl) sniffs out electronic storage media. Still just a pup, the 18-month-old K-9 is one of fewer than two dozen such dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices. While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it, they are able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss.

Detective Cameron Hartman points to the high-profile case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who was convicted on child pornography and other charges last year. A K-9 named Bear, who was trained by the same man who trained URL, led investigators to hidden thumb drives inside Fogle's home. The US Attorney's office for Southern Indiana confirmed those devices contained evidence against Fogle. URL has found evidence relating to pornography during the execution of search warrants for the task force in several investigations of child sex crimes and child trafficking. "He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday September 06 2016, @10:02AM

    by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday September 06 2016, @10:02AM (#398038)

    In the worst case, dogs want to please people, and they learn to alert whenever the handler wants them to.

    This is true. See the linked paper.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078300/ [nih.gov] "Handler beliefs affect scent detection dog outcomes" - Animal Cognition 2011 May; 14(3): 387–394.

    Our aim was to evaluate how human beliefs affect working dog outcomes in an applied environment. We asked whether beliefs of scent detection dog handlers affect team performance and evaluated relative importance of human versus dog influences on handlers’ beliefs.
    ...
    Handlers’ beliefs that scent was present potentiated handler identification of detection dog alerts. Human more than dog influences affected alert locations. This confirms that handler beliefs affect outcomes of scent detection dog deployments.

    But the USA Federal courts don't seem over-worried:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/federal-appeals-court-drug-dog-thats-barely-more-accurate-than-a-coin-flip-is-good-enough/?utm_term=.19f9a976d556 [washingtonpost.com] "Federal appeals court: Drug dog that’s barely more accurate than a coin flip is good enough"

    There's no doubt that dogs have a more sensitive sense of smell than humans (they can detect smells at lower concentrations), and have greater discrimination (they can tell the difference between more types of smells than humans); the problem is, they are bred to please their owner, and are very good at reading the non-verbal (and subconscious) cues given by handlers. This means that, although they will find more search items than humans working without dogs, they are prone to a high rate of false positives. This can be worked around, to a limited extent: for example, see the work done on getting dogs to detect cancer:

    http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2006/Canine-Cancer-Detection1mar06.htm [mindfully.org]"Diagnostic Accuracy of Canine Scent Detection in Early-and Late-Stage Lung and Breast Cancers" - Integrative Cancer Therapies, v.5, n.1 1mar2006

    In this study, a double blinding protocol was used to better evaluate the dog's performance.

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