I'm already spinning up a comprehensive FOIA request with MuckRock.com. Feel free to reply to my comment if anyone would like to collaborate.

Can you include something like this?

"What states does ERAD currently have contracts with? With what states does ERAD anticipate contracts to be signed in the next 180 days, and for all of these states, what percentages will ERAD be earning on funds seized?"

I'd need to FOIA every police department in order to do this :/ Not scalable. I can create a template that can be used whenever its discovered which police departments are using their services.

I'm in touch with the news station that has the contract, so I should be able to get it without an additional FOIA request. Once I have that, I'll recurse further if necessary.

I'd love to see what progress you make with this

I'm interested in three things:

1) ERAD training materials disseminated to law enforcement agencies (LEAs).

2) Correspondence between those LEAs and DHS, or occurring in DHS forums, regarding ERAD technology.

3) DHS reports, studies or memoranda mentioning ERAD usage in the field by DHS or any other agency.

I figure DHS Science & Technology Directorate might not be the right target. Should I just aim at DHS directly, or is there a specific group that would handle those connections between DHS and other law enforcement?

Should I structure this as three separate requests?

Thank you for this

Yes, please. Thanks.

With luck, you'll get in touch with me on the right afternoon, and I'll immediately put plenty of energy into this.

Absolutely

Don't forget!

I'd like to see what you come up with.

thank you

The COO is on linkdin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-beckerman-37819514

I found their website, and a page describing the service I believe these police are using. https://www.erad-group.com/fci

Also, I noticed that site:www.erad-group.com doesn't return anything on google, but it does on other search engines. Did ERAD request that it be removed from search results? Why would they do that? Why would they also not have a robots.txt if that is the case?

From their html source:

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
  <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" />
  <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
  <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" />

Not sure what they are intending here. But my guess is they don't either.

[edit: submitted too soon by mistake]

I think they mean that case-sensitive crawlers are disallowed, and they reserve the right to arbitrarily sue case-insensitive crawlers under the CFAA.