Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • July 21, 2019 3:26 PM

@ VinnyG, vas pup,

I guarantee that once admitted to the bay, a locked car would provide no physical, legal, or ethical (laughable, I agree) impediment to any LEO or other official stooge…

There is no place you can hide things –including yourself– when US stooges acting for otherwise impotent US politicians are involved, and there is a paper or other trail to a location.

As someone mentioned just the other day the Kim Dotcom incidents in New Zeland are a prime example. It’s been reported that NZ LEO stood outside the Dotcom residence whilst FBI goons wandered in and “filled their boots”.

Then on a more human basis do I need mention the US hard on for Julian Assange, and their attempts to find any reason to try to come up with an extraditable offence (which by the sounds of it they are having to lie about and try and force others into false testimony).

So far Ed Snowden has the protection of another super power but the question is how long will that last?

So you have to do three things,

1, Convert fiscal wealth into as small a physical package of real wealth as you can.

2, Convert / disguise the real wealth package into something that if found looks worthless.

3, Put the worthless package somewhere that has no trail back to you.

During WWII two nobel scientists escaped from what became Nazi occupied Europe. Back the Nobel medals were struck in near pure gold. A colleague who stayed behind got two jars disolved the medals in aguareigia and put the resulting sludge into the jars, but a lable on them that said something innocuous and put them on a shelf in a university laboratory. Where they remained undiscovered despite various searches untill after the war, when the gold was recovered and returned to the Nobel institute that re-struck it back into medals.

The simple fact is most official goon brains are like box cars runing behind the organisational engine. As with most such hierarchies standing out from the crowd is not recommend if there is any risk behind it. When you look in those box cars you find trained minds, but they have been trained to work in limited domains. Thus knowledge of proceadure, law and limited scene of crime work. Their brains are rarely trained in science or highly technical subjects, if they see something “normal” looking then they tend to regard it as what it looks. They might examine it for contact evidence, but won’t test the object unless some reason to do so comes up like it is suspected as the object of having been used as a weapon.

As someone once pointed out to me, would you expect a “crock of gold” under an old tumble down cottage wall?

The answer is “probably not”, but it turns out Victorian builders would use any old junk in the bottom of a trench to start foundations on. Some of that old junk like glass bottles are now highly desirable collectors items.

The thing about walls is whilst the do sometimes get knocked over or repaired the foundations are rarely dug out even when the wall is demolished and something entirely different put on top.

Thus the thought occurs that somewhere like a garden wall foundation with the package disguised to look like old building rubble being used as hard core could be left undisturbed for way more than a hundred years.

Sadly the most obvious candidate which is diamonds set in plaster / morter and broken brick won’t work these days… Because these days diamonds like other stones of value increasingly have microscopic serial numbers engraved inside them by laser, thus they carry their own trail…

But a mind that can use science well and think well outside of a box car stands a better chance of success than any trail less goons who don’t get out of the box car.

Oh and keep away from gold. It just so happens that just an atomic number or two away is another metal that whilst not being totaly worthless has a sufficiently similar density that embeding rods of it in bars of gold bullion has enabled people to get away with doubling or trippling the value of the gold they actually used. Such bars did turn up in gold repositories and had verifiable certificates that had been sold. The result is that once gold has been accepted into a bullion repository nobody in their right mind touches it they just swap the verified certificates and pay the repository storage fees… Such certificates are because they are verified highly traceable… Similar issues exist with other precious metals.

Clive Robinson • July 22, 2019 1:04 AM

@ Alyer Babtu,

a place that, in the complications and long times of its environment, has slipped from recollection.

I’m old enough to remember several places from the late 1960’s,to early 1970’s in London, that even though they are still there the entrances have been replaced and all signage removed, so have in effect disappeard from “common memory”.

They were places of minor common interest, like a Roman bath house excavated under a Georgian style house, that had been found when the house was converted to offices. There was a simple door with steps down to a simple viewing platform. The door was unlocked and hooked back in the morning and closed and locked in the evening but otherwise unattended during the day. So you could just wander in, which on a hot busy summers day was a “god send” as it was a cool quiet haven to hide away in for a little while.

Then this happened,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/31/newsid_2464000/2464143.stm

Whilst the Tower is still there and remained an “Official Secret” for a couple of decades, it was prior to the bomb the busiest “Public Attraction” with a rotating restaurant and viewing galleries. After the bomb the public viewing areas were closed effectively permanently as was the restaurant when the operating lease expired.

Due to the fact the bomb had been hidden in a public area and not found despite a search, privately owned public access places of minor interest that were not attended closed. And appart from legal requirments for historic monuments are not likely to ever open as they did ever again.

The tower it’s self is not the former glory as I remember it, the majority of the microwave antennas ceased to be used and eventually after a protracted legal process were removed on health and safety grounds, nore does it stand out like it used to do, as other larger buildings have effectively hidden it over the years (which is the reason it was built in the first place, “to get signals over new buildings” back in 64, that as they say is “progress”).

Clive Robinson • July 22, 2019 10:30 AM

@ 65535,

The current certificate for clintonemail.com was issued by GoDaddy in 2013

If I remember correctly, back then GoDaddy generated the key pair and installed the Private Key for you (they would not let you do it any other way apparently).

Thus the privacy was compromised befor you even got started…

As for gold, as in most things in life it’s “buyer beware” unless you know how to test it and verify it you would be unwise to trust it outside of a gold repository vault.

Whilst Canadian gold coins are well thought of, where are you going to buy them without leaving a trail or taking a risk. Premium product is ripe for forgery and as the UK knows you can get 25% forgery in circulation –old £1 coins– if the economics are right…

Clive Robinson • July 23, 2019 1:59 PM

@ 65535,

I am trying to stay away from the political side Hillary Clinton’s and her home email server

You and me both..

Seriously Clive, do you have millions of dollars to buy bars of gold?

Not yet 😉

But then I could buy some of these,

https://m.alibaba.com/showroom/tungsten-gold-bar.html

There’s obviously a market for a tungstan alloy at exactly the same density as gold, which China is happy to supply.

But seriously though, when you are looking for something that is high value, small, easily transportable, and easily convertable into other more day to day currency without the serious devaluation issues of paper money or awkward questions, then precious and semiprecious metals and stones would have been high on your list less than a decade ago.

As for buying gold or diamonds I’ve purchased them in small quantities in the distant past, when involved with someone who increased their value a lot by turning them into custom jewelry. I met them when involved with gold recovery from electronic scrap. You realy would be surprised at just how much gold was in early IC’s that you could pick up at auctions of bankrupt stock. Likewise other high value metals from PCB edges and the connectors they got plugged into. If you have computers from the 1970’s and 80’s that your other half may think of as “old junk” there is probably enough gold in there to make a nice set of jewlery. Not so modern electronics where the price of gold and other precious metals is way to high and other metals including aluminium have replaced them and in the process halved the reliability figures.

But you realy had to be carefull even back then, there was a series of VAT frauds doing the rounds. In the UK one of the things that did not get a 15% hit for VAT was gold coins, thus criminals were buying up coins melting them down adding a little copper or some other metals to hide the origins of the gold[1] then taking it to legitimate refiners as “recoverd scrap” to be refined further which was a speciality of Kenneth Noye and Brian Reader[2]. The criminals would then sell on the refined and certificated gold as bullion subject to VAT and sell it to jewllers and the like for a small fraction less but make a fat profit on the VAT. Oh and it was also a way to fence out stolen jewlery that would get thrown in the mix.

Thus in precious and semiprecious metal and stone markets criminality covers the entire range from 8crt from house breaking cheap jewlery through 24crt from safe deposit boxes and quite a few people including the Tax man takes very detailed interest.

However it’s insurance companies that have taken the biggest interest in getting stones etc not just certified but serial numbered. De-Beers had a real scare a few years back. Somebody discovered that by heating certain lower value stones up you could make a diamond change colour etc from a lower value bottom end not realy jewelry market to much higher value stones. Thus another way to fence stolen jewlery at an even higher value for those who had access to the very specialised equipment –in Russia and Ukrain– to stop the diamond turning to near worthless graphite. Initially De Beers found a test using a specialised fluroscope to tell stones that may had been heated. Then someone discovered heating them up to a higher temprature for longer stopped that particular test working. But by then laser marking had become practical. If you want to know a little more on the subject then,

https://gci-gem.com/pdf/diamond%20color%20treatments%20and%20identification.pdf

[1] Look up Kenneth Noye, you might well be shocked at what you find out. All in all he was not a very smart crook and murdering police officers and drug dealers was more along his original stock in trade. Even petty crooks are smarter than that these days thanks to the use of technology. But he had learnt a lot about how to launder gold. I was asked back then to spec up specialised surveillance equipment that would work from Spain where he was assumed to be holed up and London without using the telephone network as at the time it was assumed that Noye and his associates had bribed officials etc from his behaviour in the UK.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/04/brinks-mat-how-mossack-fonseca-helped-hide-millions