By day, Officer David Schwindt of the Iowa City Police Department bikes or walks the streets of the downtown pedestrian mall, stopping to chat with shoppers and handing out small necessities such as clean socks to the homeless people who live there. By night and on weekends, he builds technology that has the potential to change the face of digital forensics.

Schwindt (pictured) is a bit of an oddity in the high-stress but low-tech world of street-level law enforcement. He’s a geek. And an entrepreneur. His Latent Wireless venture indulges both his inner techie and his passion for law enforcement.

The company will soon begin shipping a hardware and software platform that enables law enforcement officers to identify stolen computer equipment by monitoring Wi-Fi signals. The technology works by reading the media access control, or MAC, address, a unique identifier that’s assigned to every device that connects to a network. Addresses (which look like this: “01:0a:95:9d:68:16”) are unique and never change. They’re unencrypted by design and are part of every packet that goes out over the network.

Using Schwindt’s invention, officers in a patrol car can “sniff” the MAC address of every Wi-Fi-enabled device in the vicinity using a small network scanner attached to a laptop. Software strips out everything but the MAC address and a bit of location information, and displays the approximate location of found devices on a Google map (pictured below). Behind the scenes is a database of MAC addresses of stolen equipment. If the computer finds a match, it drops a pin nearby. Officers then use a directional antenna as a sort of high-tech divining rod to determine the final location.

“It works phenomenally well,” Schwindt said. “We can narrow down to a room in a home from the sidewalk or the exact unit in an apartment building.”

A stubborn problem

Schwindt started Latent Wireless two years ago with two partners to address and intractable technology theft problem. Recent statistics are scarce, but a 2010 study by the British Standards Institution estimated that 5.5 million laptops were stolen over a three-year period in the U.S. alone. The FBI estimates that law enforcement officials only recover about 3 percent of stolen laptops.

There’s a lot more at stake than just the value of pilfered equipment. Stolen laptops often contain sensitive financial or intellectual property information, the value of which far exceeds that of the hardware. Latent Wireless’ technology also isn’t limited to PCs. It can also be used to find missing or abducted people by listening for their Internet-enabled mobile devices.

The founders scraped together about $130,000 in grants and seed funding to develop their patented technology. The product will be sold only to law enforcement agencies (“I don’t want it to fall into the hands of the jealous ex-husband,” Schwindt said), nearly 30 of which have been involved in beta testing. About 85 agencies have expressed interest in buying the platform.

Accidental career

Schwindt fell into law enforcement almost by accident. He got his first computer when he graduated high school, “and it drove me crazy that I didn’t know what to do with it,” he said. After devouring PC-related books at the library, he landed a job in the tech support department of an internet service provider. There he learned HTML and later dabbled in the C programming language as a hobby.

“In the middle of all that, for an inexplicable reason I applied to be a police officer,” he said. He was so ambivalent about a career in law enforcement, in fact, that when the department called to offer him a job, he asked for time to think about it before accepting. Twenty years later, he says he loves being a cop. “It’s something different every day and I’m not behind a desk,” he said.

Schwindt’s technical skills were actually one of the reasons he got the job. Police departments are increasingly turning to technology and the cloud to better share information and analyze data about crime and the factors that contribute to it. Under the Federal Data-Driven Justice Initiative launched last year, law enforcement agencies can apply for government grants to further their knowledge. This week Amazon Web Services Inc. named Iowa City one of the winners of its City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge for law enforcement’s work using data analytics to combat recidivism in jails.

Schwindt is an unofficial tech guru for the police force, but his primary job is foot and bicycle control. He takes pride in the contributions he’s made to remaking the police department’s image in the downtown area, which is home to many itinerant people. “When I first started, the chronically homeless would scatter whenever the police showed up,” he said. “Now they come up and talk to me.” His job is as much ambassador as enforcer; Schwindt estimated that the last time he had use force in the line of duty was more than two years ago. “When someone is in a bad mood or acting out, I can usually calm them down,” he said.

Obstacles to success

Latent Wireless’ success is by no means assured. For one thing, there is no master registry of stolen equipment by MAC address, so the company and its customers will need to build one from scratch. “Existing databases only contain information such as make, model and serial number,” he said. “There has never been a reason to collect and document the MAC address before.”

Fortunately, those numbers are easy to find. They’re often printed on packaging or captured by asset management software. The bigger challenge will be getting the word out that victims of theft have a new recourse for recovery.

The platform also hasn’t been tested in court against the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment restrictions on unreasonable search and seizure or federal wiretap codes. Those are among the reasons Latent Wireless doesn’t get involved in advising its customers on how to use the information they discover.

But at least they’ll have the information. As a result, “We think we can make a big dent in the 97 percent of devices that can’t be recovered,” Schwindt said.

Image: Latent Wireless on Facebook