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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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re developing a “pre-crime detector” that detects hostile thoughts.
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.
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.)
Thanks to a software program called a zapper, even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners can siphon cash from computer cash registers and cheat tax officials.
[…]
Zappers alter the electronic sales records in a cash register. To satisfy tax collectors, the tally of food orders, for example, must match the register’s final cash total. To hide the removal of cash from the till, a crooked business owner has to erase the record of food orders equal to the amount of cash taken; otherwise, the imbalance is obvious to any auditor.
[…]
The more sophisticated zappers are easy to use, according to several experts. A dialogue box, which shows the day’s tally, pops up on the register’s screen.
In a second dialogue box, the thief chooses to take a dollar amount or percentage of the till. The program then calculates which orders to erase to get close to the amount of cash the person wants to remove. Then it suggests how much cash to take, and it erases the entries from the books and a corresponding amount in orders, so the register balances.
Contrary to popular belief, homicide due to mental illness is declining, at least in England and Wales:
The rate of total homicide and the rate of homicide due to mental disorder rose steadily until the mid-1970s. From then there was a reversal in the rate of homicides attributed to mental disorder, which declined to historically low levels, while other homicides continued to rise.
Paper and press release.
Remember this the next time you read a newspaper article about how scared everyone is because some patients escaped from a mental institution:
We are convinced by the media that people with serious mental illnesses make a significant contribution to murders, and we formulate our approach as a society to tens of thousands of people on the basis of the actions of about 20. Once again, the decisions we make, the attitudes we have, and the prejudices we express are all entirely rational, when analysed in terms of the flawed information we are fed, only half chewed, from the mouths of morons.
Interesting analysis:
Since its birth 12 years ago after a fatal kidnapping in Texas, Amber Alert has quickly become one of the best-known tools in the national law enforcement arsenal. The warnings are familiar to anyone who watches cable TV news, especially during the summer, when the drumbeat of abduction stories seems to increase. Last year, 227 alerts were issued nationwide, each galvanizing interest in the local community and flooding police with tips. While the particulars of the state systems differ, the goal is the same: to disperse news of a kidnapping as widely and quickly as possible, in the hope that someone will spot the kidnapper before a child is harmed.
The program’s champions say that its successes have been dramatic. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, more than 400 children have been saved by Amber Alerts. Of the 17 children Massachusetts has issued alerts on since it created its system in 2003, all have been safely returned.
These are encouraging statistics—but also deeply misleading, according to some of the only outside scholars to examine the system in depth. In the first independent study of whether Amber Alerts work, a team led by University of Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that Amber Alerts—for all their urgency and drama—actually accomplish little. In most cases where they were issued, Griffin found, Amber Alerts played no role in the eventual return of abducted children. Their successes were generally in child custody fights that didn’t pose a risk to the child. And in those rare instances where kidnappers did intend to rape or kill the child, Amber Alerts usually failed to save lives.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.