Dallas police lose 8TB of data, impacting criminal cases
I think what's interesting for me is the lack of transparency on the system in use here and the guarantees that the data truly is being protected from alteration well. Losing data is common and should not be a big deal for a County sized office, muchless a Texas based one, yet somehow here we are.https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/16/dallas_county_memo.pdfReading the actual memo, there's another interesting aspect on whatever "TechShare" is; a quick look suggests this is the site of the software in question[0], but there is absolutely no technical information available about it at all. Based on the blurbs, it looks like some project tracker but custom made for law enforcement, but again it's a complete black box as to what the software does, how it ensures data integrity, etc.The memo is very specific about ensuring data gets uploaded to this TechShare, but this just makes me wonder "how does TechShare guarantee data integrity?", and I question if it really would have helped, but it's impossible to know because both the Dallas County's data processing methods and any information on TechShare are complete black boxes. This adds no value to security for them, and in fact probably just makes it worse as the software is never really audited nor are the IT practices.Combined with the fact that this data-loss was not announced for 4 months after the fact and that cases that may have been affected by the data-loss (e.g., missing evidence), I come away with a very bad picture of law enforcement technology. I'm not sure why there isn't more publicly available scrutiny on the IT practices of law enforcement †, particularly when it comes to handling evidence/case data.[0] https://techsharetx.gov
† As I'm very cynical of US law enforcement in general (many more of course, but right now focusing on US), my own answer for this is that it's intentionally done to obfuscate the process, but this is just the cynical and myopic part of me, which I want to separate from the rest of the post.