The NYPD is starting to catch up with CSI: they announced yesterday that they have started incorporating a new facial recognition unit into the department, which will use digital technology to match video images of people at crime scenes to mug shots on file. It promises to be their biggest technological advancement since they discovered the Segway.  The unit will run out of the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center; in addition to the “faceprinting,” they will include license plate readers and a network of surveillance cameras, which are already being created between Canal St. and Battery Park, and river to river from 34th to 59th Sts. Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, thinks the technology is too unproven: “These images are dumped into these big databases and used in a very unreliable way. It would result in a lot more false positives, and a lot more people would become suspects.” But the News notes an even more exciting crime technology the NYPD is developing: “footwear

What the Good Surveillance Operative Knows   On the journey to becoming a Good Surveillance Operative, you should gain a true and deep understanding of the tradecraft and the surveillance profession—and wear it like a second skin.   Here are a few articles of faith:   A Good Surveillance Operative…   1. Is nimble, flexible and understands what is required from the profession. 2. Relies on tried-and-true tradecraft and embraces new techniques and modern surveillance technology.   3. Knows when to be covert and when to be overt—in a covert way.   4. Has all the necessary equipment of their trade but needs the most basic tools to accomplish their mission.   5. Embraces the daily grind and continually works at improving their tradecraft.   6. Understands the general rule of law and how to accomplish their operations within the generous shade of her boundaries.   7. Knows that you must “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Whether it’s sitting in surveillance vehicles on brutally hot or freezing cold days, surveilling a subject in a tough neighborhood, following vehicles in heavy rush hour traffic or remote country roads, knocking on someone’s door at night to gather information, or being available 24/7/365

Nearly a decade ago, Solid State drives (SSD) revolutionized computer storage, bringing to the table blazing fast access speeds, low power consumption, and absence of moving parts. Along with these benefits, consumers saw severely restricted lifespan. An older SSD could only withstand so much wear before it would start losing memory. A limited number of write cycles still remains a limitation today. By this day, we still have to cope with the same limitations thanks to the ever shrinking manufacturing process and the invention of new types of NAND cells (namely TLC cells that can keep 3 bits of information per physical cell instead of 2 bits in MLC and a single bit in SLC cells). In order to overcome these technological limitations while continuously reducing the cost-per-gigabyte of storage, manufacturers perfected some very smart software algorithms. These algorithms ensure that the load is distributed evenly among the cells, quickly remapping logical addresses of NAND cells to ensure that the next write operation will occur to a cell with the least wear.   Another limitation of flash-based memory is the fact that one can only write new data into an empty (erased) cell. Once an SSD drive fills up, each

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