APPLE ACCUSED OF IMPERSONATING POLICE DURING SEARCH FOR MISSING iPHONE PROTOTYPE

According to SF Weekly, six investigators claiming to be members of the San Francisco police department descended upon one Bernal Heights, San Francisco man’s home in search of a lost iPhone 5 prototype that CNEToriginally reported had been left in a bar. The scary part? The SFPD confirmed the investigators weren’t police officers at all. Instead, it appears as though they may have actually been members of Apple’s security team allegedly impersonating police officers. The officers in question claimed that they had traced the iPhone 5 to the man’s house using the device’s GPS feature. “They threatened me,” Sergio Calderon, the 22 year old man whose house was searched, said. “We don’t know anything about it, still, to this day,” he toldSF Weekly. “They made it seem like they were on the phone with the owner of the phone, and they said ‘The person’s not pressing charges, they just want it back. They’ll give you $300,” he added. Reportedly, the police force that did investigate Calderon offered him a number to call if he found any more information on the device. SF Weekly called the number and Anthony Colon, an Apple employee answered the call. Colon is currently employed by Apple as a “senior investigator,” and he once worked for the San Jose police department. Earlier on Friday, it was reported that San Francisco’s police department did not currently have an open investigation into a lost iPhone prototype, despite CNET’sclaims to the contrary. ”This is something that’s going to need to be investigated now,” Lieutenant Troy Dangerfield of the San Francisco police department told SF Weekly. “If this guy is saying that the people said they were SFPD, that’s a big deal.” It’s unclear where the story will turn from here, but it sounds like Apple certainly played a role in the incident. The San Francisco Police Department stated that it would only launch an investigation into the matter if Calderon decides to speak with them directly. UPDATE: The SFPD is now saying they did "assist" Apple in the search, however it is still no clear if the Apple investigators portrayed themselves as police officers.

NYPD CREATES SOCIAL NETWORKING UNIT TO SCOUR SITES FOR PERPS

The New York Police Department has many different specialized units from the Special Victims Unit to SWAT and the bomb squad. Now a new unit is being formed that will be tasked with scouring various social networks for evidence and possible crimes that are posted by perpetrators. New York's newly minted Assistant Commissioner, Kevin O'Connor, will enlist the department's juvenile justice unit to take on this task.

15 SUSPECTED ANONYMOUS MEMBERS ARRESTED IN ITALY

The Italian government capped off a long investigation yesterday with a series of 32 raids across Italy and one in Switzerland. Authorities arrested 15 alleged members of Anonymous and accused them with conducting denial of service attacks against government web sites and the web sites of private and state-owned media organizations.

The alleged Anonymous members are being held in separate locations around the country, and all are aged between 15 and 28. Five of those detained are minors, under the age of 18. The Italian police also said they are not done with their list of people to detain, and are looking for an additional 30 people they claim are in the group and are wanted on similar charges, including a 26-year-old whose handle is “Phre.” Italian authorities say Phre is the “leader” of the group.

Anonymous, for their part, has always maintained that the group has no “leader,” and re-iterated this point in their own statement on the arrests. AnonOps downplayed the arrests as a minor infraction, but called other Italian members of the group to conduct their own new attacks in retribution for the arrests. Their statement tells others to “Let them have it, stronger than ever.”