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By Dean WeingartenArizona – -(Ammoland.com)-Carry permits do not have to be expensive and complex. The New Hampshire permit has been fairly easy to obtain for many years, if you already had a permit from your state of residence.During the last few months I have renewed a couple of carry permits.  It is not intensely difficult, but when you have better things to do, it can be irritating. Some of the requirements make no sense. Others were obviously put in as poison pills during the passage of the original bill. Many seem designed to discourage people from obtaining a permit.As John...

In what’s believed to be an unprecedented attempt to bypass the security of Apple iPhones, or any smartphone that uses fingerprints to unlock, California’s top cops asked to enter a residence and force anyone inside to use their biometric information to open their mobile devices. FORBES found a court filing, dated May 9 2016, in which the Department of Justice sought to search a Lancaster, California, property. But there was a more remarkable aspect of the search, as pointed out in the memorandum: “authorization to depress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person who is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES...

Link only - not sure of copyright issues with Forbes.

A 28-year-old Afghani native wanted in connection with blasts in Manhattan and New Jersey that left 29 wounded has been caught after shooting at a police officer in New Jersey, according to a report. Ahmad Khan Rahami was arrested after firing at the cop in Linden, WNBC reported. Rahami, whose fingerprint was found on an unexploded device, was hunted in connection with the explosions that sparked fears of a local terror cell, according to federal officials. Earlier Monday, FBI agents raided the Elizabeth, New Jersey, home of Rahami, a naturalized US citizen who was deemed armed and dangerous, Mayor Bill...

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has come out against proposals in Chicago and New Jersey to require fingerprint background checks of drivers for ride-hailing platforms such as Uber and Lyft. Why would President Obama's onetime top lawman come out against regulation that is supposed to protect the riding public? Credit the intersection of two forces. First, Holder's tony corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, represents Uber. Also, as Holder sees it, requiring drivers to submit fingerprints may "have a discriminatory impact on communities of color." I was surprised to read about Holder's opposition, as I have trouble seeing Holder as...

s the world watched the FBI spar with Apple this winter in an attempt to hack into a San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, federal officials were quietly waging a different encryption battle in a Los Angeles courtroom. There, authorities obtained a search warrant compelling the girlfriend of an alleged Armenian gang member to press her finger against an iPhone that had been seized from a Glendale home. The phone contained Apple's fingerprint identification system for unlocking, and prosecutors wanted access to the data inside it. It marked a rare time that prosecutors have demanded a person provide a fingerprint to open...

Android biometric banks more Fort Nope than Fort Knox. Four FireEye researchers have found a way to steal fingerprints from Android phones packing biometric sensors such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the HTC One Max.The team found a forehead-slapping flaw in HTC One Max in which fingerprints are stored as an image file (dbgraw.bmp) in a open "world readable" folder. "Any unprivileged processes or apps can steal user’s fingerprints by reading this file," the team says, adding that the images can be made into clear prints by adding some padding.It is one of four vulnerability scenarios in which biometric...

That's an excellent question that national security experts can't answer. And that has them worried sick. Hacking social security numbers and passwords is one thing. But fingerprints are biometrics - they can't be changed and could open doors to hackers that would normally be closed to them. National Journal: Though the idea of hacked fingerprints conjures up troubling scenarios gleaned from Hollywood's panoply of espionage capers, not much is currently known about those that OPM said were swiped in the data breach, which began last year and has been privately linked by officials to China. In fact, the agency...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cellphones didn’t just arrive in Pakistan. But someone could be fooled into thinking otherwise, considering the tens of millions of Pakistanis pouring into mobile phone stores these days. In one of the world’s largest — and fastest — efforts to collect biometric information, Pakistan has ordered cellphone users to verify their identities through fingerprints for a national database being compiled to curb terrorism. If they don’t, their service will be shut off, an unthinkable option for many after a dozen years of explosive growth in cellphone usage here. Prompted by concerns about a proliferation of illegal and...

Serious errors in the handling of the Michael Brown shooting have been exposed by the grand jury files on the case, including Darren Wilson's gun not being tested for fingerprints – and the officer washing blood off his hands. A 12-person jury, after hearing more than 70 hours of testimony from 60 witnesses, ruled that Officer Wilson will not have to stand trial over the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. However, in the thousands of pages of evidence released to the public afterwards were glaring examples of crime scene protocol not being followed. One of Officer...

A Circuit Court judge has ruled that a criminal defendant can be compelled to give up his fingerprint, but not his pass code, to allow police to open and search his cellphone. The question of whether a phone's pass code is constitutionally protected surfaced in the case of David Baust, an Emergency Medical Services captain charged in February with trying to strangle his girlfriend. Prosecutors had said video equipment in Baust's bedroom may have recorded the couple's fight and, if so, the video could be on his cellphone. They wanted a judge to force Baust to unlock his phone, but...

Ensuring protection against the fraudulent use of passports outweighs personal privacy concerns about mandatory fingerprinting, the European Union’s top court said Thursday. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Thursday (17 October) that although the taking and storing of fingerprints for passports breached privacy and personal data rights, it did not breach the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and was in line with EU law. Article eight of the Charter includes an explicit right to the protection of personal data, but the Luxembourg-based Court ruled that the infringement of privacy was justified because fingerprinting reduced fraud. … Meanwhile, government...

The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision Monday that police may take a DNA swab from people arrested for crimes without first getting a warrant to do so. In an unusual twist, the court's conservative firebrand, Antonin Scalia, joined three of his liberal colleagues in a scathing dissent that warns the court's decision paves the way for the creation of an invasive police state. Scalia called the decision's scope "vast" and "scary," and said the DNA collection is an unequivocal violation of Americans' Fourth Amendment right to be free from "unreasonable searches and seizures" of their bodies and homes....

WASHINGTON (AP) - A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the police practice of taking DNA samples from people who have been arrested for a serious offense but not convicted of a crime, ruling that it amounts to the 21st century version of fingerprinting. The ruling was 5-4. Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, joined three of the court’s more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — in dissenting. The five justices in the majority ruled that DNA sampling, after an arrest “for a serious offense” and when officers “bring the suspect to the station to be detained in...

The Supreme Court has ruled criminal suspects can be subjected to a police DNA test after arrest -- before trial and conviction -- a privacy-versus-public-safety dispute that could have wide-reaching implications in the rapidly evolving technology surrounding criminal procedure.

Published April 29, 2013 FoxNews.com WASHINGTON – SNIPPET: "On multiple occasions, first after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and again after 9/11, Congress mandated that immigration officials come up with a verifiable entry-exit system to track foreign visitors. To date, the Department of Homeland Security has failed, despite spending billions in tax dollars. The current system, known as USVISIT, does take fingerprints and photos of international visitors when they arrive at U.S. airports, but it has no similar biometric exit system. The goal is to match entry and exit records to determine which individuals comply with their visa and...

Concealed weapons are now a little easier to carry in Clarke County and Virginia thanks to a change made the Commonwealth’s General Assembly during its latest legislative session. The law change, which removes fingerprint print submission as part of the concealed weapon permit process, means that local sheriff and police departments now can only require applicants to submit documents when applying for a license to carry a concealed handgun. “This is an example of the Dillon Rule in action,” said Supervisor Chairman Michael Hobert. “As a Dillon Rule state, localities only have the authority to enact rules expressly authorized by...

Karl Rove said Monday that Herman Cain has failed to properly respond to the POLITICO report that at least two women accused him of inappropriate behavior, saying he needs to say “yes or no.” “He’s not denying, but he ain’t responding and that’s not the best place to be,” Rove said on Fox News. “If these allegations are not true, say they aren’t true and put it behind you. If not, better get everything out sooner rather than later because in a situation like this, if there is something there, that something’s going to come out.” Continue Reading Text Size...

Criminal investigations may benefit from new forensic methods based on nanoparticles. A technique using gold nanoparticles in combination with antibodies has shown promising results for enhancing fingerprints that are over a week old. Fingerprinting, first reported in the 19th century, is still the primary source of evidence used in crime scene investigation and new methods for improving fingerprint visualisation remain in demand. Unseen (latent) fingerprints can be revealed using chemical treatments that target molecules likely to be deposited in fingerprints, such as those in hair follicle secretions. Xanthe Spindler at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia and colleagues now report a...