Computers v Crime

[VCDHunter]

I was watching Drugland (BBC Documentary) which concentrated on the island of Ibiza and the scores of drug dealers and users that decend there every year.

They had a quick interview with a member of the local police force who was demonstrating how CCTV is being used to combat drug dealing in the city centre. The CCTV was little more than a remote webcam that broadcast low quality video via ADSL to the police stations PCs. It sounds good on paper but this was, unfortunately, on PCs and it obviously didn't work too well.

Interview part 1 concluded with the dreaded BSOD followed by a long sigh from the copper indicating that he had seen this all too often. Part 2 of the interview ended with the PC he was using simply switching off followed by something, possibly swearing, in Spanish and the arms of the copper being thrown up into the air in despair.

The show itself was a bit depressing apart from the light comic relief of this poor beleagered copper trying his best to catch drug dealers using technology that just wouldn't work.

TV at its best, you got the impression from the copper trying to use it that he saw this every day.

[housepig]

you should see the article in a recent Wired about computer-crime cops in India.

told to seize computers - they come back with monitors, no cpu's.

floppy discs in evidence - gathered into bundles and stapled through the discs, like they were paper documents.

classic.

[pacmania_2001]

It's just as bad here in Australia.

Over Christmas I was talking to my cousin who works in a startup IT firm. One of the executives of the company who also created the software that the company was using was about to be fired so he wrote code into the software that in the end stole a few hundred thousand dollars.

As he was returning from his holiday to Bali the Australian Federal Police arrested him and seized his laptop that he had used in the crime. The problem was that he had encrypted all his files and the AFP doesn't have the technology or the expertise to break it. What do they do? They ask the startup IT firm if they could break it for them.