Posts in the topic "Crime"
Cat Burglars Everywhere
Posted 16 Apr 10
There’s been a flurry of books and reporting on international burglary rings recently. First was Scott Andrew Selby’s FLAWLESS, an account of the biggest gem heist ever, when a gang of Italian thieves spent more than two years preparing to rob a vault in the center of Antwerp’s diamond district. Then the New Yorker ran a story about a diffuse Balkan gang, also stealing from jewelers across Europe, but using opposite techniques: little more than smash-and-grabs, with almost no preparation. Still, they too have walked away with millions.
Finally, Wired has just published an account of a remarkably talented, diligent and hardworking Canadian thief, Gerald Blanchard. In addition to exceptional mechanical and lock skills, Blanchard routinely infiltrated banks long before the actual robbery — sometimes even before new branches had finished construction — to copy locks, take measurements, install his own monitoring equipment, and even arrange hidey-holes in case he was interrupted during the job.
Read all three stories, and you can’t help being impressed at the ingenuity and plain effort that goes into liberating goods from their owners. Besides fodder for screenwriters, these accounts illustrate just what the police are up against.
Interestingly, Blanchard and the Italian gang were caught, tried and imprisoned. The smash-and-grabbers, however — though some are in jail — have mostly eluded capture.
Sometimes simple is best.
This post indexed as: Crime
Tech Devolution
Posted 28 Feb 10
One aspect of the continuing, astonishing pace of technological development is how quickly sophisticated capabilities become available to everyday joes. The military-industrial complex is losing control of cutting-edge technology faster than ever. Just this week, three examples hit the news:
It is now cheap and easy to jam GPS navigation systems. One small device can knock out receivers for a radius of several kilometers. Even better: for a few thousand dollars extra, you can actually spoof locations! I expect this to start showing up in techno-thrillers and caper movies no later than next year.
Second, high-speed license plate scanning is now available to auto-repo companies. For the cost of the camera and a $600/mo. subscription fee, you can drive around (at up to 80 mph) checking parking lots, highways, etc for cars under a repossession order. That’s nice enough, at least for bottom-feeding collection agencies, but the larger question is: what happens to the collected data? This technology won’t stay in the, um, responsible hands of bounty hunters and repo men forever, and once large numbers of entities are using it, one could imagine all sorts of uses for vehicle tracking. Stalking, for example.
Finally, widespread commercial use of video surveillance, and effective conscription of cellphone call data, allowed authorities to rapidly discover a complete record of the Dubai assassination team. Even ten years ago this would have been impossible; now it’s everyday. (What’s most surprising is that the team, widely believed to be from Mossad, didn’t realize how easily they’d be found.)
Human ingenuity ensures a proliferation of unexpected uses for new inventions. It’s a brave surprising new world.
This post indexed as: Crime, Intelligence, Technology
Learning to Walk and Shoot Guns at the Same Time
Posted 11 Feb 10
Good policing relies on training, which depends in turn on institutional experience and wisdom – just like good lawbreaking.
I’ve been reading Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies, a thoroughly researched account of the great gangsters of the 30′s: Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, etc. (It was the basis for last year’s movie of the same name.) What’s most striking is just how incompetent everyone was: cops, the FBI, the criminals themselves.
Bank robberies go awry because no one bothered to case the bank beforehand. Getaways nearly fail when cars run out of gas, or get stuck in the mud. Innocents are gunned down by panicky, tommy-gun wielding amateurs.
But law enforcement comes off even worse. Obvious leads — fingerprints, phone records, eyewitness accounts — are ignored, while enormous effort is expended on worthless rabbit trails (finding the house were kidnapping victim Bremer was kept, for example). Over and over gangsters are caught, only to shoot their way free because the G-men left their cars a mile away, or failed to cover the back door, or simply failed to recognize who they had cornered. Dillinger’s escape from jail, using nothing but hutzpah and a carved wooden gun, is classic.
This isn’t to poke fun at Hoover’s incompetent agents, however (even if Melvin Purvis was truly and remarkably unfit for the task given him). The problem was that no one had any experience conducting complicated, wide-scale, geographically broad investigations. Even something simple, like firearms training, was ad hoc and uncertain — an agent might be taken out to plink at cans in an empty field for an hour, then sent into action.
Good guys, bad guys: they were all just making it up as they went along.
Police culture is certainly open to criticism (DWB, the blue wall, defiance of rules, and so on). But sometimes it’s easy to forget that over the decades law enforcement has gotten better at its job — and just like any process, much of that is learning from past mistakes, then institutionalizing the lessons.
Whatever happened to tommy guns, anyway?
This post indexed as: Crime, Reading
I, The Jury
Posted 01 Feb 10
Some time ago I sat on a jury. The case was difficult — if it were easy, it wouldn’t have gotten to trial — and after long deliberation, we deadlocked, 11-1.
This was unfortunate, but not rare; while only two percent of federal cases result in a hung jury, the rate for local jurisdictions is 6-7% (NCSC). It’s up to the prosecutor what happens after that (commonly a retrial).
What should we make of the individual who remains steadfast in his or her opinion, despite considerable pressure from everyone else in the room? In our case subsequent information, revealed after the trial, strongly suggested our holdout was mistaken — that the other eleven had come to a proper conclusion.
Popular opinion tends to glorify the individual, especially against mass conformity. But really, we don’t live in 1984, or 1930′s Germany, or even 1960′s Greensboro. Chances are, if you think one thing and everyone else thinks something else, you’re wrong.
We can’t all be John Galt.
That said, I have a short story that has accumulated a dozen rejections, and I keep sending it out. It’s a good story, by God, and someday someone will realize it!
This post indexed as: Crime, Personal, Writing
CIA Enlists Private Tech to Spy on Interweb
Posted 15 Jan 10
The CIA just increased their investment in a private company whose mission is to eavesdrop on social-networking flow everywhere.
Visible Technologies, which trawls “media, video, images, blogs, Twitter, and any RSS feed in 12 languages” for corporate and government clients, just announced a $22m C round. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is both an original investor and a current participant.
Should this bother you? The company’s position is that public statements are, well, public — no expectation of privacy exists. It’s no different than taking a photograph of someone on the street. Or secretly recording the behavior of people inside a supermarket. Or pointing a video camera at an political demonstration …
Legal, sure, until the collected information is used for political purposes. Like compiling dossiers on elderly peace activists: the police would never do that, would they? Oh, yeah, they would.
But that’s not the point of this post. More interesting to me are the quasi-public VC “firms” the government has set up. Besides In-Q-Tel, the Army has its own, OnPoint Technologies (not to be confused with NPR’s talk radio show), and the DOD has a larger initiative they call DeVenCi — Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative. The latter doesn’t invest directly, but facilitates “communications and mutual understanding between innovators and the DoD.” (The difference between funding, vs. guaranteeing large contract purchases in a way that supports the company, may matter less than results, which are likely to be similar.)
Set aside the politics for a moment. Even if the goals of these programs are worthwhile, we should ask, are they a good way to go about it? Remember: taxpayer dollars at work.
For one thing, the employees are well compensated. Furthermore, at In-Q-Tel a significant portion of their pay depends on the financial success of the investments — not the strategic objectives. Conflict-of-interest problems appear inevitable, as fiduciary responsibilities collide with national security concerns. Suppose Visible Technologies became an acquisition target for a Chinese internet company (which is not unheard of). Should In-Q-Tel partners oppose the sale, against their own (and the taxpayer’s) financial interest?
That’s not a hypothetical. Christopher Byron detailed stock shenanigans by In-Q-Tel a few years ago. In somewhat hyperbolic language,
This week there’s more to report on this fishy, six-year-old firm, which has been pouring a reported $35 million annually of taxpayer money into deals running the gamut from the shrewd to the idiotic. The one common feature of them all: if an investment proves profitable, much of the money flows into the pockets of In-Q-Tel’s own employees; if a deal proves a loser, the nation’s taxpayers get stuck with 100 percent of the loss.
Now, evidence is emerging that In-Q-Tel’s brand of “Heads I win, tails you lose” deal-making may go even further than that. A source familiar with In-Q-Tel’s inner workings claims that once an equity deal with a company is worked out, In-Q-Tel officials routinely begin talking the company up on Capitol Hill to help the new partner land lucrative government contracts. A Newsweek story in March of last year suggested much the same thing, reporting that In-Q-Tel helped one of its investment partners — a Nevada-based software firm called Systems Research and Development — obtain government business.
As usual, the fundamental problem is oversight. If the public, or even just a few competent senators and members of congress, were allowed to keep an eye on what In-Q-Tel and its brethren are up to, Byron would have to find other subjects.
By the way, I should mention that my novel Exit Strategy dealt with a government-intelligence VC operation gone rogue. But that was fiction.
This post indexed as: Crime, Finance, Intelligence, Military, Technology
Workplace Infiltration
Posted 18 Nov 09
Black-bag jobs don’t always require alarm bypass, lockpicking, and roping down from the skylight. Sometimes you can simply walk in.
Lunch hour is a good time, and it helps to wear a nice suit.
Unfortunately, petty criminals have figured this out too. An article in the WSJ describes a growing incidence of armed robbery inside small, white-collar offices. Increased security at other, more cash-rich locations — retail operations, for example — has driven scavengers toward softer targets.
This post indexed as: Crime
The Laundries
Posted 16 Nov 09
At some point, if you write “big” thrillers, somebody is going to have to deal with millions and millions of illicit dollars. For all its supposed complexity, money laundering really isn’t that hard — mostly because intermediaries all along the way get a cut. Since these intermediaries include large, politically powerful banks in the US and Europe, regulatory intereference is scant. Basically you just keep transferring the money through shell companies in pliant jurisdictions until the trail is muddy.
Particularly useful are the so-called tax havens: countries with extremely lax rules about everything except privacy, which they guard zealously. Switzerland is no longer a desirable location, not since UBS rolled over and gave up details on hundreds of their tax-evading American clients. But there are plenty of others willing to step up.
An article in the current New York Review of Books provides a nice summary of current options. (Behind a firewall, though, so you have to cough up three bucks or, better yet, go buy a copy on the newsstand.)  Russian oligarchs prefer Cyprus, for example. Australians like Vanuatu. And Chinese criminals flow much of their black money through the British Virgin Islands.
The author is pessimistic about anti-laundering efforts. That is bad for developing countries and the world economy generally, but possibly good for your plot.
This post indexed as: Crime, Finance
Russian Crime
Posted 13 Nov 09
I have a long-standing interest in Russian criminal society. Really, who doesn’t? It’s got everything: a long history, tradition-bound elders confronting ruthless youth, violence, vast conspiracies, and deep ties to both local police and the national state. If you want colorful villains, the mafiya are hard to beat.
The problem is how to learn more, especially if, like me, you don’t speak Russian. Babelfish only gets you so far, and after a brief flowering of interest post-collapse-of-Communism, there isn’t much of an English-language bibliography.
Still, some sources exist. One of the best is Mark Galeotti, an academic who seems to know more than anyone about the subject. Unfortunately he hasn’t become a two-posts-a-day blogger. But if you search out his byline, occasional interesting articles come along. For example: these RFE commentaries, or his infrequent but fascinating blog. And I’m looking forward to his next book, POLITICS OF SECURITY IN MODERN RUSSIA, apparently due out next year.
This post indexed as: Crime
Master Lock Crack
Posted 12 Nov 09
In the real world, Master locks are weak, weak security, easily cut open with any assistant principal’s bolt cropper. Still, sometimes your infiltration team will prefer to leave no trace. It turns out that rather than 40^3 = 64,000 possible combinations, simple manipulation can reduce this number to 100 — few enough to work through in a quarter hour or so. And you don’t even have to memorize the technique. Mark Edward Campos has created a simple, one-page graphic you can print out and carry around. Be prepared for your next lockout!
This post indexed as: Crime, Technology