The Secret Policeman’s Toy Shop
The UK Home Office’s Security and Policing Exhibition is a trove of Orwellian goodies
What do you get the policeman who has everything?
If you’re short of inspiration, head down to Farnborough on March 10–12, for the Home Office’s Security and Policing Event. It is “the UK’s premier security and law enforcement event”, the sort of jamboree where you can pick up a pair of rigid handcuffs or the latest in computer spyware. Or, equally, traffic cones.
There is a guest list, I’m afraid. According to the Home Office, “the event enables exhibitors to display products which would be too sensitive to show in a more open environment.”
So the press isn’t allowed in, but we do get a list of exhibitors. And alongside the mulitinational defence companies such as BAE Systems and Northrup Grumman, on show is a cottage industry of small British surveillance businesses, drawn from towns like Tewkesbury and Corby.
So, come, take a tour of more than 350 stalls, hawking everything from hovercraft to sonic weapons.
Let’s start with the gadgets, for there are enough to make Q weep. We’ll move on to the (probably more sinister) software later.
New to buy this year and getting attention in all the right places is the A-WASP, a ‘sound blaster’, as its all-caps name artfully suggests, developed by Cereberus Black (you’ll find them at stand C11). Police can use this to deliver clear audio messages at a distance of 250 metres or to project a sound that makes a person’s brain feels like it is “rattling around”, according to the Daily Mail.
There’s the obligatory Google Glass knock-off.
“Ok Glass, shoot that guy.”
There’s plenty of other high-tech kit on offer, especially surveillance equipment. But nothing is quite as impressive as this human-sized shredder.
She’s right to be wary. Imagine falling in.
This is the Kobra Cyclonet, which has a list price of $27,900. For that, it will ingest credit cards, aluminium cans, staples, you name it, at an astonishing rate: it can chew through 15,000 DVDs per hour.
The more ambitious police forces at the Event will surely linger at Griffon Hoverworks’s stand (c48).
If that’s a bit much, the 995ED pictured below is a sleek little run-about that would serve any police force well, especially the more waterlogged constabularies.
There’s your more standard, kinky fare. Handcuffs and batons from Total Control Handcuffs, below. Somerset-based compay Price Western offers “leather and synthetic equipment for security professionals”. As this stage, we’re all exhausted by terrible 50 Shades of Grey jokes, so I’ll just leave that there.
There’s the underwhelming and bizarre. A concealed reading torch (for policemen reading after lights-out? Naughty.). Carry-on luggage cases. The aforementioned traffic cones — they’re collapsible, too.
A machine for sorting sausages.
I mean, what?
But only one product can be best-in-show.
Perhaps you’ve wondered how the police retrieve sensitive items — drugs, skeleton keys, napkin-based evidence of insider trading — swallowed by criminals. Wonder no more.
This is the Drugloo.
In fact, it’s the Drugloo Classic. Also available from the Colchester-based company are the Drugloo Evolution TW, the Drugloo Buggy Compact and the Drugloo Covert, among others. Its purpose is “a recovery process” which is “as discreet and sympathetic as possible”.
And few things suggest discretion and sympathy more than “a 9mm thick laminated glass viewing panel”.
Remember that this is the “the UK’s premier security and law enforcement event”. The Crufts for cryptography, the Superbowl for spooks, Le Mans for those licensed to kill. But, shockingly, some companies do not meet these lofty standards when it comes to web design.
Tactical Policing Technologies (stand F52) forgot to fill in their website.
Q Electronics took a more maximalist approach.
It’s even better/worse if you visit the actual website.
Best logo award goes to Harris Technologies. The line between spy and sex offender is a thin and blurry one.
It’s not all drugloos and hovercrafts.
The cruel and beating heart of the event is surveillance software.
David Horn Communications is a business “strategically placed within minutes of the M1 motorway, major trunk roads, north-south rail lines and the London-Luton International Airport.”
They have thought of everything.
Horn offers your standard covert audio and video fare — pinhole cameras, endoscopes, and such. You can also hire surveillance vehicles directly from them. They count the Ministry of Defence and various police forces among their clients, as well as the Department of Work and Pensions.
Right now, benefit fraud receives the same level of technological sophistication as counter-terrorism. Which sounds like the most boring episode of 24 ever.
Much of the online material from such companies requires a log-in; occasionally they’re called “members’ areas”, like a crypto-Stringfellows.
Some are fairly inscrutable. Blackdot is a Cambridge-based startup that specialises in open source intelligence — information taken from public sources and fed through algorithms to glean insight. It looks similar to Palantir — Peter Thiel’s startup, used by the CIA and with a valuation of around $9 billion — or Recorded Future. They pitch their product as a “cyber bionic arm.”
With a similar, if slightly more aggressive approach, Italian company IPS offers “social networks and web 2.0 intrusion”. Its product G-Snake “has been designed specifically for Government Intelligence and Security Agencies, to provide direct access to the source of information. It is available as a tactical system, completely independent from ISPs.”
Why buy? Well, according to the firm, “the common and well known official procedures to get contents from popular web portals do not give all requested information and are usually slow.”
Laws, due process, zzzzzzzzz.
If you want a hardware solution, look no further than Telesoft. Its Tuna Data Network Recorder product copies everything passing through a network in high fidelity.
Telco companies need such devices, but it’s also pitched at security services. From the company:
“Business and personal consumers use mobile devices for talking, messaging, video, e-mail, browsing, gaming and navigation on an abundance of well-established services such as Skype, Google, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Outlook, Gmail, Netflix, gaming apps, utilities and more.”
“This accumulation of data use becomes a tangled web of packets, unorganised and undistinguished on 10G / 100G pipelines. When it is necessary to capture this information for compliance, security, cyber analysis or performance monitoring, it is becoming increasingly difficult to store everything…”
Tuna helps you sift through all of that, by keyword.
With many of these companies, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment that what they’re offering isn’t quite right. Torchlight, another online intelligence company, offers this statement, protesting just a touch too much: a “human rights compliant, and lawful Security Sector is an essential foundation for good governance and a prosperous society.”
Or take Mobile Management Content Solutions, which specifically offers “anti-Snowden technologies”, which seems unnecssarily ad hominem. Stay safe, Ed.
The really big beasts of the spyware world will of course be present at the event. Gamma Group (stand F91) and Hacking Team (stand D86) have both been scrutinised for the use of their software by less-than-rosy political regimes, including Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Last year, Privacy International filed a criminal complaint against Gamma on behalf of Mohammad “Moosa” Abd-Ali Ali, a human rights activist in Bahrain. The complaint alleged that Gamma had been criminally complicit in allowing the Bahraini government to spy on Ali. Ali was imprisoned and tortured by the police and security services.
Here’s a video from Hacking Team.
Check out that gold-standard hacker hoodie.
As our hero types away, a Marlboro-smooth voice intones: “You need more… You need to hack your target.”
The same guy apparently pops up in another promo film for another interception company (The full video’s here, and it’s quite glorious —the only spy to drive a Smart car.)
Enhance, zoom!
Hmm, maybe not the same perp.
Italian companies are weirdly prolific in the world of spyware — there’s Hacking Team, IPS, Innova, and RCS Lab, all represented at the Event. Area SpA, which helped out Bashar al-Assad with his internet monitoring needs, is another, but not attending.
Police and security forces need new technologies to deal with new environments. And they need to keep secrets.
The Policing and Security Event is weird, though. Partly in how it combines the ordinary, the odd and the oppressive.
But more worrying: a trade show that has been inscrutable for the last 30 years is these days dominated by software which is even less scrutable.
Can we have a look?
UPDATED
A reader emails: “In the very old days, one could get in to those expos (attached). Perhaps I ruined it for everyone.”
Here’s their piece for Punch on a similar event from 1989.
Highlights include: HIV protection products (“The exhibitor said, ‘AIDS is going to be big, you know’”), breast protectors and, much like today, a shredder, the Security Disintegrator from Volumatic Ltd. As the piece has it, “Police Use: a disintegrator is carefully placed behind the letter-box in the Police Complaints Department.”
If only there were a digital equivalent for FOI requests.
