Police app reveals secret details about raids and suspects
In September last year Law enforcement agents from five Southern California counties coordinated the operation to investigate, raid and arrest more than 600 suspected sex offenders. Mission, Operation Protect the Innocent., was one of the largest such raids in recent years, involving more than 64 agencies. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, this was coordinated through a free trial of an app called SweepWizard.
The raid was hailed by successful LAPD Chief Michael Moore at a press conference the following week. But there was a problem: without the knowledge of the police, SweepWizard leaked many confidential details about the operation to the open Internet.
The data that the Los Angeles Police Department and partners of the Regional Crime Against Children Online (ICAC) regional task force uploaded to SweepWizard included personal information about suspects, as well as sensitive information that, in the wrong hands, could tell suspects when they will commit a crime. were going to conduct searches and cast suspicion on people who had not yet been convicted of any crime.
The SweepWizard application, created by ODIN Intelligence, is designed to help the police conduct inter-agency raids. But WIRED discovered that it didn’t just release the data from Operation Protect the Innocent; it has already leaked confidential information about hundreds of inspections from dozens of departments over several years. The data included personal information about hundreds of officers and thousands of suspects, such as geographic coordinates of suspects’ homes, times and locations of raids, demographics and contact details, and sometimes even suspects’ social security numbers. According to security experts, all this data was probably exposed due to a simple misconfiguration of the application.
The Los Angeles Police Department said it was not aware of the issue until WIRED reached out for comment. In a telephone conversation, Capt. Jeffrey Bratcher, LAPD juvenile division commander and project director for the ICAC task force, said the department was concerned and taking the matter seriously. “Operational security is always of paramount importance to us. We don’t want people to know when and if we will come,” he says.
In a separate statement, Capt. Kelly Muniz of the LAPD’s media relations division said the department had suspended use of SweepWizard pending a thorough investigation. According to their statement, “The department is working with federal law enforcement to determine the source of the unauthorized disclosure, which is currently unclear. At this time, the investigation has not established whether a third-party application or other tool is the source of the unauthorized release.”
The recovered data contained the location and names of 5,770 suspects, mostly based in California. In some cases, the data included their height, weight, and eye color, as well as whether they were homeless. For more than 1,000 of these suspects, SweepWizard also disclosed their social security numbers. Some of these suspects were reportedly minors at the time of the searches. Arrest records and press releases confirm that several people named in the leaked data were arrested after the raid.