Food in Defense of a Crime
Last year, throwing hot coffee in the face of a store clerk was a new robbery tactic. Now, we have a Pizza Hut delivery man throwing a hot pie in the face of a would-be (armed) mugger.
Entries Tagged "crime"
Page 19 of 39
Audit
As the first digital president, Barack Obama is learning the hard way how difficult it can be to maintain privacy in the information age. Earlier this year, his passport file was snooped by contract workers in the State Department. In October, someone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaked information about his aunt’s immigration status. And in November, Verizon employees peeked at his cell phone records.
What these three incidents illustrate is not that computerized databases are vulnerable to hacking—we already knew that, and anyway the perpetrators all had legitimate access to the systems they used—but how important audit is as a security measure.
When we think about security, we commonly think about preventive measures: locks to keep burglars out of our homes, bank safes to keep thieves from our money, and airport screeners to keep guns and bombs off airplanes. We might also think of detection and response measures: alarms that go off when burglars pick our locks or dynamite open bank safes, sky marshals on airplanes who respond when a hijacker manages to sneak a gun through airport security. But audit, figuring out who did what after the fact, is often far more important than any of those other three.
Most security against crime comes from audit. Of course we use locks and alarms, but we don’t wear bulletproof vests. The police provide for our safety by investigating crimes after the fact and prosecuting the guilty: that’s audit.
Audit helps ensure that people don’t abuse positions of trust. The cash register, for example, is basically an audit system. Cashiers have to handle the store’s money. To ensure they don’t skim from the till, the cash register keeps an audit trail of every transaction. The store owner can look at the register totals at the end of the day and make sure the amount of money in the register is the amount that should be there.
The same idea secures us from police abuse, too. The police have enormous power, including the ability to intrude into very intimate aspects of our life in order to solve crimes and keep the peace. This is generally a good thing, but to ensure that the police don’t abuse this power, we put in place systems of audit like the warrant process.
The whole NSA warrantless eavesdropping scandal was about this. Some misleadingly painted it as allowing the government to eavesdrop on foreign terrorists, but the government always had that authority. What the government wanted was to not have to submit a warrant, even after the fact, to a secret FISA court. What they wanted was to not be subject to audit.
That would be an incredibly bad idea. Law enforcement systems that don’t have good audit features designed in, or are exempt from this sort of audit-based oversight, are much more prone to abuse by those in power—because they can abuse the system without the risk of getting caught. Audit is essential as the NSA increases its domestic spying. And large police databases, like the FBI Next Generation Identification System, need to have strong audit features built in.
For computerized database systems like that—systems entrusted with other people’s information—audit is a very important security mechanism. Hospitals need to keep databases of very personal health information, and doctors and nurses need to be able to access that information quickly and easily. A good audit record of who accessed what when is the best way to ensure that those trusted with our medical information don’t abuse that trust. It’s the same with IRS records, credit reports, police databases, telephone records – anything personal that someone might want to peek at during the course of his job.
Which brings us back to President Obama. In each of those three examples, someone in a position of trust inappropriately accessed personal information. The difference between how they played out is due to differences in audit. The State Department’s audit worked best; they had alarm systems in place that alerted superiors when Obama’s passport files were accessed and who accessed them. Verizon’s audit mechanisms worked less well; they discovered the inappropriate account access and have narrowed the culprits down to a few people. Audit at Immigration and Customs Enforcement was far less effective; they still don’t know who accessed the information.
Large databases filled with personal information, whether managed by governments or corporations, are an essential aspect of the information age. And they each need to be accessed, for legitimate purposes, by thousands or tens of thousands of people. The only way to ensure those people don’t abuse the power they’re entrusted with is through audit. Without it, we will simply never know who’s peeking at what.
This essay first appeared on the Wall Street Journal website.
Tourist Scams
Interesting list of tourist scams:
I have only heard of this happening in Spain on the Costa del Sol, but it could happen anywhere. This scam depends on you paying a restaurant/bar bill in cash, usually with a €50 note. The waiter will take your payment, then return shortly after, apologetically telling you that the note is a fake and that you need to pay again. He will return the “fake” bill to you, and any change you’re due. Of course, you gave him a REAL note, he gave you a FAKE note, and you gave him a second real note, so you paid €100 for a €50 meal. What I do now is write unobtrusively on all large notes I get, so I can challenge them if it happens to me.
TSA Aiding Luggage Thieves
In this story about luggage stealing at Los Angeles International Airport, we find this interesting paragraph:
They both say there are organized rings of thieves, who identify valuables in your checked luggage by looking at the TSA x-ray screens, then communicate with baggage handlers by text or cell phone, telling them exactly what to look for.
Someone should investigate the extent to which the TSA’s security measures facilitate crime.
When Sky Marshals Do Bad Things
They’re not even close to perfect:
Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism organization, has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.
The meta-problem is that the kind of person who wants to be federal air marshal is the exact kind of person we don’t want for the job.
Before 9/11, the Air Marshal Service was a nearly forgotten force of 33 agents with a $4.4 million annual budget. Now housed in the Transportation Security Administration, the agency has a $786 million budget and an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 air marshals, although the official number is classified.
And 3,000 to 4,000 is a lot of people to hire quickly; it’s hard to weed out the bad eggs.
Horrible Identity Theft Story
This is a story of how smart people can be neutralized through stupid procedures.
Here’s the part of the story where some poor guy’s account get’s completely f-ed. This thief had been bounced to the out-sourced to security so often that he must have made a check list of any possible questions they would ask him. Through whatever means, he managed to get the answers to these questions. Now when he called, he could give us the information we were asking for, but by this point we knew his voice so well that we still tried to get him to security. It worked like this: We put him on hold and dial the extension for security. We get a security rep and start to explain the situation; we tell them he was able to give the right information, but that we know is the same guy that’s been calling for weeks and we are certain he is not the account holder. They begrudgingly take the call. Minutes later another one of us gets a call from a security rep saying they are giving us a customer who has been cleared by them. And here the thief was back in our department. For those of us who had come to know him, the fight waged on night after night.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
Guess the year:
Murderous organizations have increased in size and scope; they are more daring, they are served by the most terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces which, if recklessly unchained, may some day wreck universal destruction. The Orsini bombs were mere children’s toys compared with the later developments of infernal machines. Between 1858 and 1898 the dastardly science of destruction had made rapid and alarming strides…
No, that wasn’t a typo. “Between 1858 and 1898….” This quote is from Major Arthur Griffith, Mysteries of Police and Crime, London, 1898, II, p. 469. It’s quoted in: Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism, New Brunswick/London, Transaction Publishers, 2002.
Thoughtcrime
We’re developing a “pre-crime detector” that detects hostile thoughts.
India Using Brain Scans to Prove Guilt in Court
This seems like a whole lot of pseudo-science:
The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence—except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.
[…]
This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals—defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime—as prosecutors see it—and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.
The software tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions—the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.
EDITED TO ADD (10/13): An expert committee said it is unscientific, but their findings weren’t accepted.
News from the Rock Phish Gang
Based in Europe, the Rock Phish group is a criminal collective that has been targeting banks and other financial institutions since 2004. According to RSA, they are responsible for half of the worldwide phishing attacks and have siphoned tens of millions of dollars from individuals’ bank accounts. The group got its name from a now discontinued quirk in which the phishers used directory paths that contained the word “rock.”
The first sign the group was expanding operations came in April, when it introduced a trojan known alternately as Zeus or WSNPOEM, which steals sensitive financial information in transit from a victim’s machine to a bank. Shortly afterward, the gang added more crimeware, including a custom-made botnet client that was spread, among other means, using the Neosploit infection kit.
[…]
Soon, additional signs appeared pointing to a partnership between Rock Phishers and Asprox. Most notably, the command and control server for the custom Rock Phish crimeware had exactly the same directory structure of many of the Asprox servers, leading RSA researchers to believe Rock Phish and Asprox attacks were using at least one common server. (Researchers from Damballa were able to confirm this finding after observing malware samples from each of the respective botnets establish HTTP proxy server connections to a common set of destination IPs.)
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.