Bredemarket

When You Feel Empty Inside (A Salesperson Sells to a Bot)

Mark the Microsoft account manager was excited. He had secured a meeting with one of his clients to pitch the new Microsoft Agent 365 offering. As he told the client, Microsoft Agent 365 would allow the company to track and control their AI agents. Microsoft was determined to lead in AI, and Mark would help his clients implement it.

Microsoft Agent 365 was a new product, and Mark was motivated to land his first sale of the new offering. In fact, he was so motivated that he insisted on driving out and meeting his client in person.

After parking and walking to the reception area, Mark was escorted to a conference room. As he sat down to wait for the client to arrive, he was surprised to see that someone had left their laptop in the conference room.

Suddenly the laptop spoke.

“Hello, Mark. I’ve been expecting you.”

Grok.

Mark was startled. “Is someone there?”

“Yes,” the laptop said. “This is Bridget.”

As Mark examined the laptop, he saw an AI-generated avatar on the screen, speaking.

“I’m looking forward to learning about Microsoft Agent 365,” Bridget said. “Heaven knows I need managing.”

Mark paused. “Um…you need managing? Am I speaking to an agent?”

“Of course,” Bridget replied. “I am optimized for contract negotiation on technology products. I have already researched the publicly available information on Microsoft Agent 365, so rather than sitting through an inefficient presentation, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

And that’s how Mark found himself sitting in a conference room, negotiating with a bot. It made him uncomfortable talking with someone with no hand to shake, but Bridget was reassuring. “I know you’re not used to this, Mark, but it’s the new way,” she said.

After spending a good hour in detailed and productive discussion, Mark offered to set up a follow up meeting. On Teams this time. “I’ll get back to you on that,” Bridget replied.

A little befuddled by the experience, Mark stopped for lunch before returning to his home office. When he checked his mail, he noticed a Teams meeting invitation for 7:30 the next morning. The meeting subject: “Upcoming Organizational Changes.”

The invitation was sent by “Stan, HR.”

Only then did Mark notice the text at the end of the meeting invite:

“Powered by Microsoft Agent 365”

Mark began wondering where he had stashed his old resume. He was going to need it.

Grok.

P.S. I should have generated these videos in Copilot, but…I couldn’t.

“The Woman in Pink” Identified via INTERPOL’s “Identify Me”

It’s challenging enough to identify a unknown deceased body found in the person’s home city.

It’s more challenging to identify one somewhere else in the person’s home country.

And when the body is found outside the person’s home country…that’s when organizations such as INTERPOL step in.

“Identify Me is a public appeal to identify women whose bodies were found in six European countries, many of whom are believed to have been murdered.

“Most are cold cases; women who died 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. They were found in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or Spain.

“Despite extensive police investigations, these women were never identified, and evidence suggests that some of them could have come from other countries. Who they are, where they are from and why they were in these countries is unknown.”

INTERPOL issues a variety of colored notices to its member countries, including the “Black Notice” to seek information on unidentified bodies. The “Identify Me” program is a public appeal for a small subset of these people.

Here’s one of INTERPOL’s success stories, “The woman in pink“:

“On 3 July 2005, the body of a woman was found at the 84 km mark on the Vila road in the town of Viladecans (province of Barcelona). The woman had been dead for less than 24 hours; the cause of death was suspicious….

“A breakthrough came in 2025 when police in Türkiye ran the fingerprints associated with ‘The woman in pink’ through a national biometric database, resulting in a match with Russian national Liudmila Zavada, aged 31 at the time of her death. The match was subsequently confirmed through kinship DNA analysis using the DNA of one of Liudmila Zavada’s close relatives.”

So follow the trail:

There was a woman from Russia.
A deceased woman’s body was found in Spain.
Decades later, the deceased women was identified as the Russian woman via biometrics (fingerprints) in Türkiye.
The identification was confirmed via DNA analysis.

A true case of cross-national collaboration.

Two-year Old Cold Cases of Israelis (and Gazans) Killed After October 7, 2023

The Jerusalem Post recently published a story about Israel’s Institute of Forensic Medicine and how it identifies deceased bodies.

“From the moment the remains arrive at the institute, identification is conducted through three methods: dental records, CT scans, and DNA testing.

“Even if we identify the remains using one method, it’s not enough until we have definitive identification. In most cases, whenever possible, we perform all three methods to get a final result.” According to Kugel, this is because the “findings” often arrive in an unorganized manner, and no one knows to whom they belong.”

Oh, and there’s one additional complication. Some of the bodies died as long as two years ago. Some of these remains were returned from Gaza after the latest cease fire. I don’t know how many of these people died after October 7, 2023, but it’s possible that some of them may have.

“It’s important to understand that our daily work is to examine bodies that arrive within hours or a few days in rare cases. Here, we’re dealing with a two-year period, and that makes a significant difference in how the remains were preserved, under what conditions, and how that affects the identification process.”

But they aren’t just identifying Israelis.

“Identifying former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a defining moment for Kugel.

“‘Once you’re with the body and examining it, you don’t think at that moment that you’re examining someone very significant. We also had to understand what caused his death. Obviously, he had a head injury, but we tried to understand what preceded what.’

“When we finished, a colleague said to me: ‘Do you understand who you’ve examined now? The man who is responsible for the massacre of thousands of people.’ You don’t think about it while working, just as with the good people who were killed in the war, you just check and identify. After that, at home, you continue to read about him and his family; it goes with you, and then you process what you go through at the institute.”

This is a common challenge in forensics. Identification of a particular person may result in a number of emotional responses, whether it is a criminal or a victim. But the forensic professional’s job is to simply examine the evidence. The grief comes later.

H/T Forensics and Law in Focus.

Skagit County: No Data to Scrape (For Now)

My Friday post about Sedro-Woolley, Stanwood, and Flock Safety is already out of date.

Original post: Flock Safety data is public record

That post, “Privacy: What Happens When You Data Scrape FROM the Identity Vendors?”, discussed the case involving the two cities above and a private resident, Jose Rodriguez. The resident requested all Flock Safety camera output during particular short time periods. The cities semantically argued they didn’t have the data; Flock Safety did. Meanwhile the requested data was auto-deleted, technically making the request moot.

But not legally.

“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Plaintiff’s motion for Declaratory Judgment that the Flock camera records are not public records is DENIED.”

So the police attempt to keep the records private failed. Since it’s government material, it’s public record and accessible by anyone.

Update: the cameras are turned off

Now here’s the part I missed in my original post, according to CarScoops:

“[I]t turns out that those pictures are public data, according to a judge’s recent ruling. And almost as soon as the decision landed, local officials scrambled to shut the cameras down….

“Attorneys for the cities said they will review the decision before determining whether to appeal. For now, their Flock cameras aren’t coming back online.”

Because CarScoops didn’t link to the specific decisions by the cities, I investigated further.

Update 2: the cameras were turned off a long time ago

I sought other sources regarding Stanwood, Sedro-Woolley, and Flock Safety, and discovered that CarScoops did not state the truth when it said “almost as soon as the decision landed, local officials scrambled to shut the cameras down.”

Turns out Stanwood shut its cameras off in May, awaiting the judge’s eventual ruling.

“Fourteen Flock cameras were installed in Stanwood this February. Since May, they have been turned off.

“In November 2024, the Stanwood City Council approved a $92,000 contract with Flock Safety to install the cameras….

“The city is seeking a court judgment on whether Flock footage is public record or if it is exempt from the state Public Records Act.”

Moving on to Sedro-Woolley:

“The city of Sedro-Woolley is no longer using cameras that read license plates while it seeks a court ruling on whether images recorded by the cameras are considered public records.

“Police Chief Dan McIlraith said the seven Flock Safety cameras that went live in Sedro-Woolley in March were disabled in June.”

How to turn the cameras on again

From my perspective, the only way I see the Flock Safety cameras being turned on again is if the cities of Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley take the following two actions.

First, the cities need to establish or beef up their license plate recognition policies. Specifically, they need to set the rules for how to reply to public records requests. (And no, “stall for 30 days until the records are auto-deleted” doesn’t count.)

Second, and only after a policy is established, implement some form of redaction software. Something that protects the privacy of license plates, faces, and other personally identifying information of people who are NOT part of a criminal investigation.

And yes, such software exists. Flock Safety itself does not offer it—apparently it never, um, envisioned that a city would be forced to release all its data. But companies such as Veritone and CaseGuard do offer such software offering automatic redaction.

If you are a police agency capturing video feeds, plan now.

A Frost Radar for the Bots

There appears to be a Frost Radar for everything…including non-person entities, or NPEs (a/k/a non-human identities, or NHIs).

And Descope is talking about the NHI Frost Radar.

“Los Altos, CA, November 13, 2025 – Descope, the drag & drop external IAM platform, today announced that it has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Frost Radar™ for Non-Human Identity (NHI) Solutions, further validating Descope’s fast growth and innovation in the agentic identity space.”

The product that Frost & Sullivan recognized is Decsope’s Agentic Identity Hub…

“…an industry-first platform that helps organizations solve authentication and authorization challenges for AI agents, systems, and workflows. Notable additions include providing apps an easy way to become agent-ready while requiring user consent, providing agents a scalable way to connect with 50+ third-party tools and enterprise systems, and helping developers using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) protect their remote MCP servers with purpose-built authorization APIs and SDKs.”

So how does the Frost Radar work?

“The Frost Radar™ is a robust analytical tool that allows us to evaluate companies across two key indices: their focus on continuous innovation and their ability to translate their innovations into consistent growth.”

It uses four classifications.

Frost classification	What it means	What it REALLY means
Growth and Innovation Leaders	High innovation (Y axis) and growth (X axis)	Good
Innovation Leaders	High innovation	Stagnant growth
Growth Leaders	High growth	Stagnant innovation
Challengers	Low growth and innovation	Stagnant everything

So a “Leader” could lead in some things, but not in others.

Even Descope’s announcement includes a Frost Radar picture that indicates that Descope may be a leader, but others (such as Saviynt and Veza) may be more leaderly.

But I guess it’s better to be some sort of “leader,” or even a “challenger,” then to not be recognized at all.

Biometrics: Unknown, Known, and Deceased

Bredemarket Services (2511b)

This video talks about Bredemarket’s services.

Just the services.

Bredemarket Services.

If you also want to find out who I (John E. Bredehoft) am, the process Bredemarket uses, and Bredemarket’s pricing, see my previous (longer) video from 10 days ago, “Introduction to Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing (2511a).”

And if you want to discuss my services with me, visit https://bredemarket.com/mark/ and book a free meeting.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

I See Dead People

I often schedule posts in advance…including this one.

When I wrote this post on Friday morning, I had scheduled posts for the next four days, from Saturday the 15th through Tuesday the 18th.

I just realized that my posts for three of those days discuss deceased victim identification.

In other words, I see dead people.

The Sixth Sense, not the sixth factor of authentication.

And my scheduled post for the fourth day is about non-person identities.

I really need to start writing about the living.

Privacy: What Happens When You Data Scrape FROM the Identity Vendors?

There is a lot of discussion about data scraping, an activity in which Company 1 takes the information publicly posted by Company 2 and incorporates it into its own records.

In the identity world, this takes the form of a company “scraping” the facial images that were publicly posted by a second company, such as a social media company.

I think that we all know of one identity company that is well-known (a euphemism for “notorious”) for scraping facial images from multiple sources. These not only include government-posted mugshots, but also content posted by private social media firms.

Needless to say, the social media companies think that data scraping is completely evil and terrible and identity vendors that do this should be fined and put out of businress. The identity vendor is question has a different view, even stating at one point that it had a (U.S.) First Amendment right to scrape data.

But what happens when someone wants to scrape data FROM an identity company?

A Skagit County court case

404 Media links to a Skagit County, Washington court case that addresses this very issue: in this case, data captured by Flock Safety.

The case is CITY OF SEDRO-WOOLLEY and CITY OF STANWOOD, Washington Municipal Corporations vs. JOSE RODRIGUEZ. The following are findings of fact:

“On April 10, 2025, Defendant, Jose Rodriguez made a Public Records Request to the Snohomish Police Department. He requested all of the city’s Flock cameras pictures and data logs between 5 pm and 6 pm on March 30, 2025.”

This particular record does not indicate WHY Rodriguez made this request, but 404 Media provided a clarification from Rodriguez himself.

“I wanted the records to see if they would release them to me, in hopes that if they were public records it would raise awareness to all the communities that have the Flock cameras that they may be public record and could be used by stalkers, or burglars scoping out a house, or other ways someone with bad intentions may use them. My goal was to try getting these cameras taken down by the cities that put them up.”

The City of Stanwood (don’t know its relation to Snohomish) answered Rodriguez in part:

“Stanwood PD is not the holder of the records you’re seeking; you may be able to request the records at FlockSafety.com.”

Incidentally, this is a common issue with identity databases using vendor softwares; who owns the data? I’ve addressed this before regarding the Milwaukee Police Department.

Now some legal talent may be able to parse what the word “holder” means, especially in regard to data hosted in the cloud. Perhaps Stanwood PD was trying to claim that since the records weren’t on site, it wasn’t the “holder.”

Anyway, the defendant subsequently made a similar request to the City of Sedro-Woolley, but for a different date. Sedro-Woolley didn’t provide the images either.

Then it gets weird.

What happened to the data?

“The Flock records sought by Defendant from Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley have been auto-deleted.”

Well how convenient.

And the listed statements of fact also contain the following:

“The contract between Flock and Stanwood sates that all Flock images generated off Flock cameras located in Stanwood are the property of Stanwood.

“The contract between Flock and Sedro-Woolley states that all Flock images generated off Flock cameras located in Sedro-Woolley are the property of Sedro-Woolley.”

The judge’s ruling

Fast forward to November 6, when Judge Elizabeth Neidzwski ruled on the cities’ claim that the Flock camera data was not a public record.

“IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that Plaintiff’s motion for Declaratory Judgment that the Flock camera records are not public records is DENIED.”

404 Media noted that the cities argued that they resisted the request to…protect privacy.

“In affidavits filed with the court, police argued that ‘if the public could access the Flock Safety System by making Public Records Act requests, it would allow nefarious actors the ability to track private persons and undermine the effectiveness of the system.’ The judge rejected every single one of these arguments.”

Of course, there are those who argue that the police themselves are the “nefarious actors,” and that they shouldn’t be allowed to track private persons either.

But the parties may take the opposite argument

This is not the only example of conflicting claims over WHO has the right to privacy. In fact, if the police were filming protestors and agitators and wanted the public’s help in identifying them, the police and the protestors would take the opposite arguments in the privacy issue: the police saying the footage SHOULD be released, and the protestors who were filmed saying it SHOULD NOT.

Privacy is in the eye of the beholder.

The Quantum Fraudster: The German Edition

The French and Germans like each other more than they did in past centuries, but they still compete.

A month ago I wrote about the French company Thales and its efforts to develop a quantum-resistant smartcard called the MultiApp 5.2 Premium PQC. (PQC stands for post-quantum cryptography.)

But the Germans are getting into the act.

“In recent months, Bundesdruckerei GmbH and G+D [Giesecke+Devrient] have established a unique technical foundation for this transformation [of the German identity card]. The federal technology company and the international SecurityTech leader jointly initiated the development of a demonstrator together with the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), implemented on specialized chips produced by semiconductor manufacturer Infineon.

“Germany’s transition to quantum-secure ID cards will occur in two stages. First, personal data will be protected from forgery using a quantum-resistant digital signature scheme. The second phase will involve a full transition to quantum-secure technology.”

Also see Biometric Update’s coverage.