As technology progressing at very rapid pace, New tricks are adapted to train old dogs to detect electronic devices.
Dogs were trained to detect narcotics and explosives but new trained Labrador dog named Selma can smell the scent for laptops, digital cameras and those easy-to-conceal USB drives.
In 1986, police trained the first dog in the world to sniff out arson with the help of Jack Hubball, who identified accelerants that the canines could focus on. He then moved on to help police train dogs to detect narcotics and bombs, Bloomberg reports.
To crack computer crimes, the 26-year forensics-lab veteran based in Connecticut had to first identify the chemicals associated with electronic-storage devices. Hubball took circuit boards, hard disks and flash drives of computers and tested each component. He narrowed the analysis down to a single common chemical, which police declined to specify or describe, Kristen Schweizer writes.
“Selma has found many devices such as digital cameras with flash cards, USB drives and external drives,” says Detective George Jupin of the Connecticut State Police’s Computer Crimes Unit, who is now Selma’s handler. “The evidence she finds has furthered investigations.”
Electronic Devices often used to stash illegal materials like child pornography, which the FBI says is growing fast. The agency estimates that some 750,000 predators are online at any given moment with victims often found in chatrooms and on social networks.
Via - Bloomberg