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posted by martyb on Friday October 14 2016, @03:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the $weet-contract dept.

That's right, the NYPD is finally -- finally! -- catching up with the modern mobile age and equipping its officers with smartphones, nearly a decade after the first iPhone came out. The NYPD began rolling out its first handsets for the city's 36,000 police officers in April 2015, and finished equipping the entire force earlier this year. Now, new officers at the New York City Police Academy in College Point, Queens, get phones along with their guns and badges.

As the advent of smarter phones have improved our daily lives, these handsets have likewise made it easier for the city's finest to fight crime. Officers are able to respond to 911 calls faster, solve crimes more efficiently and create stronger ties to their community.

So what are the phones of choice for the men and women entrusted to guard the safety of the 8.4 million residents of New York?

The Lumia 830 and Lumia 640 XL.

You read that right. Life and death situations rely on outdated phones running on Microsoft's Windows Phone software.

One of the world's largest police forces will be using Windows phones.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Friday October 14 2016, @08:48AM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Friday October 14 2016, @08:48AM (#414204) Journal

    An officer can see his GPS location and all of the kid touchers within a small radius, helpful if a child has been taken.
    It's better because it doesn't require the city to setup another network.
    Windows Phone doesn't get much malware because almost no one has it.
    Has a city's cell grid failed like that? 9/11 was different because the Verizon building itself was hit, and they lost the switches inside WTC.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by jcross on Friday October 14 2016, @01:30PM

    by jcross (4009) on Friday October 14 2016, @01:30PM (#414263)

    Correction: almost no one that mattered *had* it. A police force this large is a very ripe target, and I doubt many here will argue that Windows Phone isn't riddled with vulnerabilities. The Mexican cartels operate huge networks of halcyones, inconspicuous low-level informants on street corners with radios, reporting on every movement of the police. This allows them to do business wherever the police aren't, which clearly will always be a larger area than where they are. Hiring halcyones in NY would be very expensive, but if you were able to hack the phones the officers were carrying, you wouldn't need to. Just a few weeks worth of cop tracks would give you an excellent heat map with insight into their tactics and strategy, the least-patrolled areas, progress of investigations against you, existence and nature of undercover operations, etc.

    And hell, it's not like you need to compromise every phone with a zero-day to do this, all you need is the central servers that keep the phones updated, or one insider with access to the code for the custom apps they run on these phones. Indeed given all the noise about telemetry lately, even Microsoft servers might be holding the relevant data, and DNS could be poisoned to send that telemetry elsewhere. And if the phones say hello with Bluetooth or whatever, you could put out some little beacons that monitor that, or spy on the metadata from tower traffic. If it smells like a Lumia, and it's in NYC, it's at least 99.9% likely to be a cop! I'm fairly sure they haven't thought this one all the way through with a paranoid mindset.

    • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday October 14 2016, @06:58PM

      by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 14 2016, @06:58PM (#414409) Journal

      halcones not halcyones, which is Spanish for hawk, and a very fitting name, considering their activity.

      • (Score: 2) by jcross on Friday October 14 2016, @08:49PM

        by jcross (4009) on Friday October 14 2016, @08:49PM (#414444)

        Eh, that's what I get for not double-checking stuff that bubbles up out of my memory. Thanks.