My Landlord Ratted Me Out to the Cops
thebillfold.com
thebillfold.com
- Internet crime is reported
- Police IT team tracks it to specific IP and address
- Contacts owner, she says (incorrectly) the WIFI is secured with only the two people at the address having access
- Regular police is sent to collect all computers at the address
- When the police IT team realizes the computers weren't connected to the scam, they are returned within two weeks.
The only thing that really went a bit bad is the reported attitude of the regular police officers sent to the address.
Of course it would have been better to have sent someone better at both IT and english. If either of those had been different they might never have taken the computers, but the two weeks to clear things up are pretty good as government organizations goes.
* did police payed the damage caused by confiscating computers? It could be easily thousands euro.
* crime was a few stolen theater tickets. Confiscating stuff seems like over-reaction, when bike is stolen (similar value) they do not even bother to come to crime scene.
They weren't there because someone stole theatre tickets, they were there because someone stole credit card numbers - which is more serious, largely because it's a lot more scalable than stealing a bike.
Also article only talks about single credit card.
We should not make difference between crimes, just because one has strong bank lobby behind it.
He could be stealing credit cards using a VM stored in a USB stick.
That's service. When the German police took away my computer and I turned out not to be guilty I had to get it back from the police station in the next large town. The computer was pretty much destroyed. I don't know what they do in 'computer forensics' but I assume it has something to do with slamming a hammer into the main board and playing soccer with the hard drives ...
Later I asked my lawyer what to do about this. He told me it was pretty pointless to try and I should see it a 'cost of doing business for living in this great democracy'.
Germany as a state grands you a lot of rights, but expects you to do your share as a citizen - like not becoming a suspect.
Don't bother. They also took my digital camera. And my fax machine. (disclaimer: It was 2004 - nowadays I don't have a fax). :)
The thing is not about if you can prove that something was damaged by the police. The thing is how much time and energy do you want to spend on getting a small compensation for that stuff.
If you want to prove a point: go on but don't think that there will be any consequences for a police officer because of this.
In my case for me it was just not worth it. The PC was pretty old and suing through 3 instances would have taken some years.
I learned from the thing one lesson: Don't run an open wifi network in Germany - because even if you're not guilty the process of a criminal investigation will fuck up your daily routine. (That's also why I don't run TOR nodes even though I think it's an important project.)
And it used to be they didn't have an Mac monitors, keyboards or mice, so they'd take ALL your Mac stuff. But for a PC they just take the tower.
From your perspective, your computers have been stolen.
> I’m not even all that pissed off about it. She genuinely thought I was the only person with the password. I probably would have given me up too.
Even knowing that the wireless network was unsecured would not have stopped them from taking his computers and the router (as there was no particular reason to think he hadn't unsecured it knowing they were coming).
Don't answer any questions, (unless the law requires you to,) they can lie about it later or they might misremember. Say you're not going to discuss anything without a lawyer, ask for a translator if you don't speak their language well. If they don't have a warrant (if that sort of thing's applicable where you are) don't let them into your home, (if I'd been him, I'd have met them on the doorstep to my flat with the door closed and locked behind me.)
What you say can hang you, especially when you're talking to people who don't know what you're talking about.
Their ignorance would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that some people have been arrested and convicted of crimes for which they were innocent of because of it.
Say he had been guilty. He could "given" the police the nice clean computer, while the real evidence sits on a NAS/cloud somewhere, or been encrypted, or have done anything that would confuse people who don't have a clue where digital evidence actually resides. It becomes a designed system to catch innocents, while guilty people can run circles around the system.
The point is, there's no limit to what he could do once he's allowed to touch the computer.
That's how I decommission drives and other media assuming I can't physically destroy (which I usually can and do, but sometimes it happens). Overwrite with random data. Sometimes multiple times if I'm in no hurry. Much easier if the device is in an external reader rather than being your boot disk of course. Sometimes it takes awhile.
I still have scar on my hand from snapping my first glass platter. Hmm platters from this era, were always metal, yeah that's what I thought before it shattered.
Personally, I think a middle term would be more appropriate - police agents should have a decent grasp of English (i.e., better than mine), and visitors to the country should know either the local language or English. An "interlocutor of his preference" seems an excessive requirement.
I would say Denmark is somewhat undecided what to do about language. Whether the norm should be "if you move here you must integrate", or whether it's good that Copenhagen has foreigners from all over who use English (rather than Danish) as the lingua franca, is one of the actively contested areas of Danish politics. The business sector is increasingly using English internally, and wants to put out an image to expatriates that Copenhagen is an international city where they're welcome, and where everyone speaks English. But some Danes are understandably worried about the implication that they will not be able to get a job in their own country speaking only Danish. This is already the case, sometimes de-facto and sometimes a formal requirement, for many professional jobs, but perhaps not for police. And there are also cultural worries about what it would mean if Copenhagen becomes more of an international, English-speaking city than a Danish city (Berlin has some similar cultural debates, but Germany's government and big businesses are less English-accommodating than Denmark's).
Unless you make that a legal and well-known requirement for residence in a country, that's just not okay. Do I agree with the general idea, that 'guests in a country' (i.e. foreigners with a working permit) should learn about the local culture, the language? Sure.
But
- the author claims that he knew some danish. Learning the local language to flirt, order a beer and talk about the weather isn't the same as defending yourself in a legal case
- you need the translator anyway for short-term visitors that you want to charge (unless you ask people to learn the language before they go there as a tourist)
I'm speaking from the perspective of someone that worked in Tel Aviv for a year. I cannot speak Hebrew (well.. words, stupid phrases. I cannot speak a coherent sentence). That's unfortunate, since I tend to like the parts of the language I know. Languages are just .. hard, for me. Learning a language while you're working full time is worse. Being shy about using it -> even worse. The idea that a cop would've expected me to defend myself in Hebrew is .. a nightmare.
Frankly, if I'd be charged in London I'd ask for a German translator. I think antirez wrote an article (during that 'accent' discussion) recently that struck home: Even if you know a foreign language, you're often limiting yourself to the same topic. Smalltalk in English? Why not. Talking tech stuff? Sure thing. But I wouldn't try to argue with a cop just like I wouldn't feel comfortable discussing arts or doing pillow talk in that language.
Your point on local culture/language may be applicable in other scenarios like speaking to local clients, buying groceries, shopping for clothes but alleged involvement in a crime which can lead to time (years?) in prison is a different matter altogether.
I lost the last changes that weren't on the Subversion server (2005, remember). I resumed work the next day, from the slightly older/slower/noisier laptop the one in the backpack replaced.
The importance of off-site backups cannot be exaggerated.
If your everyday environment is VM's on the cloud then you don't need even that and you're good to go from any device instantly, but it's a bit too limiting for me - but keeping all data + portable executables with config on Dropbox is simple, and leaves actual backups only as emergency precaution for cases if the cloud services screw you somehow.
For personal data, Dropbox's versioning has been a lifesaver for me - if I have overwritten or changed something, I can get back also the previous versions; quite a few backup solutions don't keep the history. But for me the important data is various documents, so it's not that large - for example, I personally don't see the reason for making family videos, as even for our wedding video we just browsed through it once and haven't touched it in all the years afterwards, there's new stuff to do instead of watching old stuff.
Indian police's track record in handling cybercrime is unparalleled. http://www.rediff.in/news/2008/jan/21inter.htm
And the ISPs stupidity too adds to it, most of the times.
*in the lines of Four Yorkshiremen.
Turns out the wifi had no password.
:)
Basically there's no way Panera would give wifi away if that were true.
http://www.hakim.ws/st585/KevinDevine/
The same applies to many brands, not just the one in this example.
Why? I genuinely want to know. What harm is there if my WiFi is open? Is there a danger that someone will use up my bandwidth? (I don't really care.) Is there a risk that evil [child pornographers / terrorists / whoever it is we hate this week] will use my open WiFi connection and thus be completely untraceable (which they could never have achieved without my assistance)?
Firesheep is another example of why not. If you use WPA then even plain http traffic is encrypted from your computer to the wireless router. If you have completely open wifi then the traffic between your computer and the router is in the plain for everyone to inspect freely.