Sam Harris on Self-Defense
I thought this was very interesting. His three principles are:
- Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places.
- Do not defend your property.
- Respond immediately and escape.
Entries Tagged "crime"
Page 11 of 39
The Effects of Social Media on Undercover Policing
Social networking sites make it very difficult, if not impossible, to have undercover police officers:
“The results found that 90 per cent of female officers were using social media compared with 81 per cent of males.”
The most popular site was Facebook, followed by Twitter. Forty seven per cent of those surveyed used social networking sites daily while another 24 per cent used them weekly. All respondents aged 26 years or younger had uploaded photos of themselves onto the internet.
“The thinking we had with this result means that the 16-year-olds of today who might become officers in the future have already been exposed.
“It’s too late [for them to take it down] because once it’s uploaded, it’s there forever.”
There’s another side to this issue as well. Social networking sites can help undercover officers with their backstory, by building a fictional history. Some of this might require help from the company that owns the social networking site, but that seems like a reasonable request by the police.
I am in the middle of reading Diego Gambetta’s book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. He talks about the lengthy vetting process organized crime uses to vet new members—often relying on people who knew the person since birth, or people who served time with him in jail—to protect against police informants. I agree that social networking sites can make undercover work even harder, but it’s gotten pretty hard even without that.
Funniest Joke at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Nick Helm won an award for the funniest joke at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:
Nick Helm: “I needed a password with eight characters so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
Note that two other jokes were about security:
Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”
Andrew Lawrence: “I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.”
Zodiac Cipher Cracked
I admit I don’t pay much attention to pencil-and-paper ciphers, so I knew nothing about the Zodiac cipher. Seems it has finally been broken:
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who preyed on couples in Northern California in the years between 1968 and 1970. Of his seven confirmed victims, five died. More victims and attacks are suspected.
The killer sent four messages to newspapers in California’s Bay Area, only one of which has ever been decrypted. This first message split into three parts claimed Zodiac wanted to kill victims so that they would become his slaves in the afterlife.
The 408-symbol cryptogram was cracked by Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, California.
Code and solution—with photos—here.
EDITED TO ADD (8/5): Solution seems to be a hoax.
Organized Crime in Ireland Evolves As Security Increases
The whole article is interesting, but here’s just one bit:
The favoured quick-fix money-making exercise of the average Irish organised crime gang had, for decades, been bank robberies. But a massive investment by banks in branch security has made the traditional armed hold-up raids increasingly difficult.
The presence of CCTV cameras in most banks means any raider would need to be masked to avoid being identified. But security measures at the entrances to many branches, where customers are admitted by staff operating a buzzer, say, means masked men can now not even get through the door.
By the middle of the last decade, cash-in-transit vans delivering money to ATMs were identified by gangs as the weak link in the banks’ operations. This gave rise to a huge number of armed hold-ups on the vans.
However, in recent years the cash-in-transit companies have followed the example of the banks and invested heavily in security technology. Most vans carrying money are now heavily protected by timing devices on safes in the back of the vans, with staff having access to only limited amounts of cash at specific times to facilitate their deliveries.
These security measures have led to a steady decline in robberies on such vans in the past five years.
But having turned from bank robberies to armed hold-ups on cash vans, organised crime gangs have once again changed tack and are now engaging in robberies with hostage-taking.
Known as “tiger raids”, the robberies involve an organised crime gang kidnapping a family member or loved one of a person who has access to cash because of their work in a bank or post office.
Family members are normally taken away at gunpoint, threatened with being shot and or held until the bank or post-office worker goes to their work place, takes a ransom sum and leaves it for the gang at a prearranged drop-off point.
The Garda has worked closely with the main banks in agreeing protocols for such incidents. The main element of that agreement is that banks will not let money leave a branch, no matter how serious the hostage situation, until gardaí have been notified. A reaction operation can then be put in place to try and catch the gang as they collect the ransom.
These protocols have been relatively successful and seem to be deterring tiger raids targeting bank workers.
However, gangs are now increasingly targeting post offices in the belief that security protocols and equipment such as safes are not as robust as in the banking sector.
Most of the tiger raids now occurring are targeting post-office staff, usually in rural areas.
The latest raid occurred just last week, when more than €100,000 was taken from a post office in Newcastle West, Co Limerick, when the post mistress’s adult son was kidnapped at gunpoint and released unharmed when the ransom was paid.
Assisting a Hostage Taker via Facebook
It’s a new world:
An armed Valdez, 36, held a woman hostage at a motel in a tense 16-hour, overnight standoff with SWAT teams, all while finding time to keep his family and friends updated on Facebook.
[…]
In all, Valdez made six posts and added at least a dozen new friends.
His family and friends responded with 100 comments. Some people offered words of support, and others pleaded for him to “do the right thing.”
[…]
“I’m currently in a standoff … kinda ugly, but ready for whatever,” Valdez wrote in his first post at 11.23pm “I love u guyz and if I don’t make it out of here alive that I’m in a better place and u were all great friends.”
[…]
At 2.04am, Valdez posted two pictures of himself and the woman. “Got a cute ‘Hostage’ huh,” Valdez wrote of the photographs.
At 3.48am, one of Valdez’ friends posted that police had a “gunner in the bushes stay low.” Valdez thanked him in a reply.
[…]
Police believe that responses from Valdez’s friend gave him an advantage.
Authorities are now discussing whether some of Valdez’ friends should be arrested and charged with obstruction of justice for hampering a police investigation. “We’re not sure yet how to deal with it,” said Croyle.
Unintended Security Consequences of the New Pyrex Recipe
This is interesting:
When World Kitchen took over the Pyrex brand, it started making more products out of prestressed soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. With pre-stressed, or tempered, glass, the surface is under compression from forces inside the glass. It is stronger than borosilicate glass, but when it’s heated, it still expands as much as ordinary glass does. It doesn’t shatter immediately, because the expansion first acts only to release some of the built-in stress. But only up to a point.
One unfortunate use of Pyrex is cooking crack cocaine, which involves a container of water undergoing a rapid temperature change when the drug is converted from powder form. That process creates more stress than soda-lime glass can withstand, so an entire underground industry was forced to switch from measuring cups purchased at Walmart to test tubes and beakers stolen from labs.
Large-Scale Food Theft
A criminal gang is stealing truckloads of food:
Late last month, a gang of thieves stole six tractor-trailer loads of tomatoes and a truck full of cucumbers from Florida growers. They also stole a truckload of frozen meat. The total value of the illegal haul: about $300,000.
The thieves disappeared with the shipments just after the price of Florida tomatoes skyrocketed after freezes that badly damaged crops in Mexico. That suddenly made Florida tomatoes a tempting target, on a par with flat-screen TVs or designer jeans, but with a big difference: tomatoes are perishable.
“I’ve never experienced people targeting produce loads before,” said Shaun Leiker, an assistant manager at Allen Lund, a trucking broker in Oviedo, Fla., that was hit three times by the thieves. “It’s a little different than selling TVs off the back of your truck.”
It’s a professional operation. The group knew how wholesale foodstuff trucking worked. They set up a bogus trucking company. They bid for jobs, collected the trailers, and disappeared. Presumably they knew how to fence the goods, too.
Criminals Stealing Cars by Calling Tow Trucks
It’s a clever hack, but an old problem: the authentication in these sorts of normal operations isn’t good enough to prevent abuse.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.