Entries Tagged "crime"

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Low-Tech Burglars to Get Lighter Sentences in Louisiana

This is the kind of law that annoys me:

A Senate bill to toughen penalties for crimes committed with the aid of Internet-generated “virtual maps,” including acts of terrorism, won quick approval Monday in the House.

[…]

Adley’s bill defines a “virtual street-level map” as one that is available on the Internet and can generate the location or picture of a home or building by entering the address of the structure or an individual’s name on a website.

Rep. Henry Burns, R-Haughton, who handled Adley’s bill on the House floor, said that if the map is used in an act of terrorism, the legislation requires a judge to impose an additional minimum sentence of at least 10 years onto the terrorist act.

If the map is used in the commission of a crime like burglary, Burns said, the bill calls for the addition of at least one year in jail to be added to the burglary sentence.

Crimes are crimes, regardless of the ancillary technology used to plan them.

Posted on May 28, 2010 at 6:24 AM • View Comments

If You See Something, Think Twice About Saying Something

“If you see something, say something.” Or, maybe not:

The Travis County Criminal Justice Center was closed for most of the day on Friday, May 14, after a man reported that a “suspicious package” had been left in the building. The court complex was evacuated, and the APD Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit was called in for a look-see. The package in question, a backpack, contained paperwork but no explosive device. The building reopened at 1:40pm. The man who reported the suspicious package, Douglas Scott Hoopes, was arrested and charged with making a false report and booked into the jail. The charge is a felony punishable by up to two years in jail.

I don’t think we can have it both ways. We expect people to report anything suspicious—even dumb things—and now we want to press charges if they report something that isn’t an actual threat. Truth is, if you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

I think this excerpt from a poem by Rick Moranis says it best:

If you see something,
Say something.
If you say something,
Mean something.
If you mean something,
You may have to prove something.
If you can’t prove something,
You may regret saying something.

There’s more.

EDITED TO ADD (5/26): Seems like he left the package himself, and then called it in. So there’s ample reason to arrest him. Never mind.

Posted on May 26, 2010 at 9:16 AM • View Comments

Outsourcing to an Indian Jail

This doesn’t seem like the best idea:

Authorities in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are planning to set up an outsourcing unit in a jail.

The unit will employ 200 educated convicts who will handle back office operations like data entry, and process and transmit information.

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, as long as misusable information isn’t being handled by the criminals.

The unit, which is expected to undertake back-office work for banks, will work round the clock with three shifts of 70 staff each.

Okay, definitely a bad idea.

Working in the unit will also be financially rewarding for the prisoners.

I’ll bet.

Posted on May 18, 2010 at 7:29 AM • View Comments

Security Cameras in the New York City Subways

The New York Times has an article about cameras in the subways. The article is all about how horrible it is that the cameras don’t work:

Moreover, nearly half of the subway system’s 4,313 security cameras that have been installed—in stations and tunnels throughout the system—do not work, because of either shoddy software or construction problems, say officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s bus, subway and train system.

I certainly agree that taxpayers should be upset when something they’ve purchased doesn’t function as expected. But way down at the bottom of the article, we find:

Even without the cameras, officials said crime in the transit system had dropped to a record low. In 1990, the system averaged 47.8 crimes a day, compared with 5.3 so far this year. “The subway system is safer than it’s ever been,” said Kevin Ortiz, an authority spokesman.

No data on how many crimes were solved by cameras, but we know from other studies that their effect on crime is minimal.

Posted on March 31, 2010 at 1:24 PM • View Comments

Master Thief

The amazing story of Gerald Blanchard.

Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat, and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. He had even mounted handles on the drywall panels so he could remove them to enter and exit the ATM room. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend’s nearby machine shop. With practice, he had gotten his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score.

As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside.

From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well rehearsed, Blanchard wheeled out boxes full of cash and several money counters, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby.

Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, the Winnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm. However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars.

Posted on March 29, 2010 at 1:48 PM • View Comments

Acrobatic Thieves

Some movie-plot attacks actually happen:

They never touched the floor—that would have set off an alarm.

They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.

And they left with some $26,000 in laptop computers, departing the same way they came in—down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store.

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Similar heists.

Posted on March 24, 2010 at 1:51 PM • View Comments

Casino Hack

Nice hack:

Using insider knowledge the two hacked into software that controlled remote betting machines on live roulette wheels, the report said.

The machines would print out winning betting slips regardless of the results on the wheel, Peterborough Today said.

I’d like to know how they got caught.

EDITED TO ADD (4/17): They got their math wrong:

However, the scheme came unstuck after an alert cashier noticed a winning slip for £600 for a £10 bet at odds of 35-1. The casino launched an investigation that unearthed a string of other suspicious bets, traced back to Ashley and Bhagat, IT contractors working at the casino at the time of the scam.

Posted on March 17, 2010 at 6:33 AM • View Comments

More Surveillance in the UK

This seems like a bad idea:

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the “routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

Once again, laws and technologies deployed against terrorism are used against much more mundane crimes.

Posted on January 26, 2010 at 7:16 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.