By Chris Foresman
Well-known iPhone developer and hacker Jonathan Zdziarksy is hoping to revolutionize how people receive alerts about missing children and how information about sightings is reported to law enforcement agencies with his new AMBER Alert iPhone app.
Zdziarski often assists law enforcement agencies—at no cost—in forensic examinations of iPhones or iPod touches for a variety of cases. "Unfortunately, a large percentage of these cases involve crimes against children, which can start eating at your soul after a while," Zdziarsky told Ars. He wanted to do something about it, "which is how the idea for a GPS-based AMBER Alert system came to mind," he said.
"I decided to approach the AMBER Alert folks about it, and they liked it," said Zdziarski. "So over the weekend, I worked with one of their engineers to put it together. It went from idea to finished product in about 24 hours."
The app lists all current, active AMBER alerts with a small photo of the victim. Clicking one of the alerts brings up detailed information about the abduction, including physical description, last known whereabouts, and details and photos of suspects (if any). A "Report Sighting" button allows you to report a sighting of a victim or suspects along with your current GPS coordinates. This information is analyzed for accuracy and forwarded to the investigating state patrol agency that issued the AMBER alert.
"The iPhone is ideal for not only disseminating [the alert] information, but also for its GPS, which can allow us to aggregate multiple sightings together to assess credibility and to also build better reporting logic to the state police conducting these investigations," according to Zdziarksi.
In addition to the AMBER Alert app, which wil be available for free pending approval from the App Store, Zdziarksi is offering free code to any developer who wishes to incorporate an AMBER Alert system into their own apps. "We'd like to get as many AppStore developers to work this into their software," he told Ars. The code periodically checks the AMBER Alert system for updates in the background. "We provide a view controller and a status manager which can be used to easily flash an icon or pop up a dialogue box," in the event an AMBER alert is issued while an app is running. "Hopefully, some news apps will pick it up," he said.
Anyone can also sign up at AMBERAlert.com to receive email or SMS alerts forwarded to an iPhone, and then use the AMBER Alert app to get more details or report a sighting. Zdziarski told Ars he is hoping to be able to port the software to work with similar alert systems in other countries.
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