Entries Tagged "crime"

Page 33 of 39

Handwritten Real-World Cryptogram

I get e-mail, occasionally weird e-mail. Every once in a while I get an e-mail like this:

I know this is going to sound like a plot from a movie. It isn’t. A very good friend of mine Linda Rayburn and her son Michael Berry were brutally murdered by her husband…the son’s stepfather.

They were murdered on February 3rd, 2004. He then hung himself in the basement of their house. He left behind a number of disturbing items.

However, the most intriguing is a cryptogram handwritten on paper utilizing letters, numbers and symbols from a computer keyboard. Linda’s daughter Jenn was the one who found the bodies. Jenn is a very good friend of mine and I told her I would do everything within my power to see if this cryptogram is truly a cryptogram with valuable information or if it is a wild goose chase to keep us occupied and wondering forever what it means.

I have no idea if any of this is true, but here’s a news blip from 2004:

Feb. 2: Linda Rayburn, 44, and Michael Berry, 23, of Saugus, both killed at home. According to police, Rayburn’s husband, David Rayburn, killed his wife and stepson with a hammer. Their bodies were found in adjacent bedrooms. David Rayburn left a suicide note, went to the basement, and hanged himself.

And here is the cryptogram:

The rectangle drawn over the top two lines was not done by the murderer. It was done by a family member afterwards.

Assuming this is all real, it’s a real-world puzzle with no solution. No one knows what the message is, or even if there is a message.

If anyone figures it out, please let me know.

Posted on January 30, 2006 at 10:15 AM • View Comments

Foiling Counterfeiting Countermeasures

Great story illustrating how criminals adapt to security measures.

The notes were all $5 bills that had been bleached and altered to look like $100 bills, sheriff’s investigators said. They passed muster with the pen because it determines only whether the paper used to manufacture the currency is legitimate, Bandy said.

As a security measure, the merchants use a chemical pen that determines if the bills are counterfeit. But that’s not exactly what the pen does. The pen only verifies that the paper is legitimate. The criminals successfully exploited this security hole.

Posted on January 19, 2006 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

Who Watches the Watchers?

One problem with cameras is that you can’t trust the watchers not to misuse them:

Two council CCTV camera operators have been jailed for spying on a naked woman in her own home.

Mark Summerton and Kevin Judge, from Sefton Council, Merseyside, trained a street camera into the woman’s flat.

[…]

The images from the camera, including the woman without her clothes on, were shown on a large plasma screen in the council’s CCTV control room in November 2004, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

Over several hours, she was filmed cuddling her boyfriend before undressing, using the toilet, having a bath and watching television dressed only in a towel.

Judge Gerald Clifton told the three men: “To dismiss what was happening as laddish behaviour, something that the 21st Century apparently condones, is absurd.

“You only have to read the impact statements of the lady to realise the harrowing effect that this had on her.

“Her life has almost been ruined, her self-confidence entirely destroyed by the thought that prying male eyes have entered her flat.”

Also, The Register reported on this.

Posted on January 16, 2006 at 12:00 PM • View Comments

Anonymous Internet Annoying Is Illegal in the U.S.

How bizarre:

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

[…]

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”

What does this mean for the comment section of this blog? Or any blog? Or Usenet?

More importantly, what does it mean for our society when obviously stupid laws like this get passed, and we have to rely on the police being nice enough to not enforce them?

EDITED TO ADD (1/9) Some commenters to BoingBoing clarify the legal issues. This is from an anonymous attorney:

The anonymous harassment provision ( Link ) is the old telephone-annoyance statute that has been on the books for decades. It was updated in the widely (and in many respects deservedly) ridiculed Communications Decency Act to include new technologies, and the cases make clear its applicability to Internet communications. See, e.g., ACLU v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824, 829 n.5 (E.D. Pa. 1996) (text here), aff’d, 521 U.S. 824 (1997). Unlike the indecency provisions of the CDA, this scope update was not invalidated in the courts and remains fully effective.

In other words, the latest amendment, which supposedly adds Internet communications devices to the scope of the law, is meaningless surplusage.

Posted on January 9, 2006 at 2:38 PM • View Comments

RFID Zapper

This is an interesting demonstration project: a hand-held device that disables passive RFID tags.

There are several ways to deactivate RFID-Tags. One that might be offered by the industries are RFID-deactivators, which will send the RFID-Tag to sleep. A problem with this method is, that it is not permanent, the RFID-Tag can be reactivated (probably without your knowledge). Several ways of permanently deactivating RFID-Tags are know, e.g. cutting off the antenna from the actual microchip or overloading and literally frying the RFID-Tag by placing it in a common microwave-oven for even very short periods of time. Unfortunately both methods aren’t suitable for the destruction of RFID-Tags in clothes: cutting off the antenna would require to damage the piece of cloth, while frying the chips is likely to cause a short but potent flame, which would damage most textiles or even set them on fire.

The RFID-Zapper solves this dilemma. Basically it copies the mircowave-oven-method, but in a much smaller scale. It generates a strong electromagnetic field with a coil, which should be placed as near to the target-RFID-Tag as possible. The RFID-Tag then will recive a strong shock of energy comparable with an EMP and some part of it will blow, most likely the capacitator, thus deactivating the chip forever.

An obvious application would be to disable the RFID chip on your passport, but this kind of thing will probably be more popular with professional shoplifters.

Posted on January 4, 2006 at 6:35 AM • View Comments

Vehicle Tracking in the UK

Universal automobile surveillance is coming:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

As The Independent opines, this is only the beginning:

The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys, which has taken more than 25 years to develop, is only the beginning of plans to monitor the movements of all British citizens. The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces by computer, which many people would see as truly introducing the prospect of Orwellian street surveillance, where our every move is recorded and stored by machines.

Although the problems of facial recognition by computer are far more formidable than for car number plates, experts believe it is only a matter of time before machines can reliably pull a face out of a crowd of moving people.

If the police and security services can show that a national surveillance operation based on recording car movements can protect the public against criminals and terrorists, there will be a strong political will to do the same with street cameras designed to monitor the flow of human traffic.

I’ve already written about the security risks of what I call “wholesale surveillance.” Once this information is collected, it will be misused, lost, and stolen. It will be filled with errors. The problems and insecurities that come from living in a surveillance society more than outweigh any crimefighting (and terrorist-fighting) advantages.

Posted on December 22, 2005 at 2:41 PM • View Comments

How Much High Explosive Does Any One Person Need?

Four hundred pounds:

The stolen goods include 150 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive and 250 pounds of thin sheets of explosives that could be used in letter bombs. Also, 2,500 detonators were missing from a storage explosive container, or magazine, in a bunker owned by Cherry Engineering.

The theft was professional:

Thieves apparently used blowtorches to cut through the storage trailers—suggesting they knew what they were after.

Most likely it’s a criminal who will resell the stuff, but it could be a terrorist organization. My guess is criminals, though.

By the way, this is in America…

The material was taken from Cherry Engineering, a company owned by Chris Cherry, a scientist at Sandia National Labs.

…where security is an afterthought:

The site, located outside Albuquerque, had no guards and no surveillance cameras.

Or maybe not even an afterthought:

It was the site’s second theft in the past two years.

If anyone is looking for something to spend national security money on that will actually make us safer, securing high-explosive-filled trailers would be high on my list.

EDITED TO ADD (12/29): The explosives were recovered.

Posted on December 20, 2005 at 2:20 PM • View Comments

Computer Crime Hype

I guess this is the season for sensationalist hype of computer crime: first CNN, and then USA Today (drug users and Internet crime, for a double-scary story).

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

Posted on December 16, 2005 at 3:15 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.