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posted by janrinok on Friday May 02 2014, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-it-work?-taking-bets-now dept.

Police use new tool to source crowds for evidence:

Authorities are employing a new crowdsourcing tool to help with a Southern California investigation into an annual party gone awry last month that left dozens of people injured including several police officers. The new online and mobile app is called LEEDIR, and it can be activated after a major emergency to allow people to send pictures and videos from their smartphones to investigators. Proponents say the crowdsourcing system gives authorities a secure, central repository for the countless electronic tips that come during a crisis. And since it uses remote database servers that police access online, floods of data won't cause system crashes or be expensive to store. Privacy advocates criticize the app as overly broad, saying it subjects innocent people to police scrutiny and probably won't produce much good evidence.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by snick on Friday May 02 2014, @02:44PM

    by snick (1408) on Friday May 02 2014, @02:44PM (#38926)

    Flood it with pictures and video of cops gone wild.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @03:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @03:58PM (#38946)

    What's up with AnonTechie getting 4 consecutive stories published on the front page, three of which are edited by janrinok [soylentnews.org], who just happens to be AnonTechie's only fan [soylentnews.org]? Is this a coincidence?

    Shouldn't our news come from more than just one submitter?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by deathlyslow on Friday May 02 2014, @04:13PM

      by deathlyslow (2818) <wmasmith@gmail.com> on Friday May 02 2014, @04:13PM (#38949)

      So stop complaining and submit something. Maybe AnonTechie has a day off or is bored with work for a bit. Don't just complain do something about it if you don't like it.

    • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday May 02 2014, @08:48PM

      by AnonTechie (2275) on Friday May 02 2014, @08:48PM (#39076) Journal

      Yeah, even I was pleasantly surprised to see my name on 4 submissions at the same time. I guess it is a coincidence.
      I live in a different time zone than most of you (I guess most are from the Americas) and I may have an advantage over late breaking news. Whenever, I read something that may be of interest to this group, I like to post it in. I am sure that with more submissions, my contribution will reduce. So, keep submitting !! In a similar vein, it would have been great if anybody noticed that I did not submit a single story for nearly a month starting 21/March/2014.

      --
      Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
      • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Wednesday May 07 2014, @10:23AM

        by lhsi (711) on Wednesday May 07 2014, @10:23AM (#40475) Journal

        I think I've had 3 or 4 submissions on the front page in a row too. Like you said, it could be a different time zone thing as I've checked the "pending" page and a load from me were in a row, just because none had been submitting in between.

        I suspect that editors would just go through the pending submissions in order and queue up the really good ones in that order, which might have clumping on the main page if a number of submissions in a row are from the same person.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @07:00PM (#39036)

    Awesome, finally an app I can store on my everythingthatIdentifiesMe-smartphone, and just click a button to upload video and pictures with metadata and all straight to law enforcement's eager hands. I think a bill should be introduced that requires this on all smart phones, almost like having a "kill switch". Who would object if you've got nothing to hide? You could add features like including GPS coordinates, and maybe a history of movement of the device, auto-sound-capturing, grabbing contact-list associates from the sender (since they were at the riot in the first place damned criminals) -- all sorts of things that would make law enforcement's job "easier".

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @08:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 02 2014, @08:13PM (#39060)

    OpenWatch [f-droid.org] "This app records audio or video secretly and sends the results to OpenWatch: a participatory citizen media project to enable public monitoring of authority figures."

    This way I can film any police abuses, it's encrypted and difficult for the boys in blue to delete, and it's automagically uploaded to the internets so everyone can see.