On Q Professional Investigations

It’s been several years since the rumors and sightings of insect sized micro drones started popping up around the world.

Vanessa Alarcon was a college student when she attended a 2007 anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. and heard someone shout, “Oh my God, look at those.”

“I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’” she told The Washington Post. “They looked like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects,” she continued.

A lawyer there at the time confirmed they looked like dragonflies, but that they “definitely weren’t insects”.

And he’s probably right.

In 2006 Flight International reported that the CIA had been developing micro UAVs as far back as the 1970s and had a mock-up in its Langley headquarters since 2003.

While we can go on listing roachbots, swarming nano drones, and synchronized MIT robots — private trader and former software engineer Alan Lovejoy points out that the future of nano drones could become even more unsettling.

Lovejoy found this CGI mock up of a mosquito drone equipped with the ‘ability’ to take DNA samples or possible inject objects beneath the skin.

According to Lovejoy:

Such a device could be controlled from a great distance and is equipped with a camera, microphone. It could land on you and then use its needle to take a DNA sample with the pain of a mosquito bite. Or it could inject a micro RFID tracking device under your skin.

It could land on you and stay, so that you take it with you into your home. Or it could fly into a building through a window. There are well-funded research projects working on such devices with such capabilities.

He offers some good links though his Google+ page and Ms. Smith at Network World offers up even more.

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Some 450,000 Yahoo users’ email addresses and passwords have been leaked because of a security breach, the company confirmed Thursday, adding that just a small fraction of the stolen passwords were valid.

The company said in a statement that an “old file” from the Yahoo Contributor Network was compromised Wednesday. Among the stolen emails and passwords were many from Yahoo’s own email service along with those of other companies. The Yahoo Contributor Network is a content-sharing platform.

Yahoo said it is fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure, changing the passwords of affected Yahoo users, and notifying other companies whose users’ accounts may have been compromised.

“We apologize to all affected users,” the company statement said.

Technology news websites including CNET, Ars Technica, and Mashable identified the hackers behind the attack as a little-known outfit calling itself the D33D Company. The group was quoted as saying it had stolen the unencrypted passwords using an SQL injection – the name given to a commonly used attack in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.

“We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call,” the group was quoted as saying.

Online security experts said Yahoo might have done more to protect the stored passwords, with Ohio-based TrustedSec describing the Internet giant’s decision not to encrypt them as “most alarming.”

Nevertheless, the haul does not appear as useful to hackers as they might have thought. Yahoo cautioned that only 5 per cent of passwords associated with its account holders were valid.

It was not immediately possible to contact the Ukraine-registered website associated with D33D Company. Its contact form was inoperable Thursday, while an email address and a phone number attributed to the site’s registrant appeared to be invalid.

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Dead animals, smelly garbage and broken windows overrun the comments of hundreds of people who replied to an MSN Real Estate message board request for landlords to share stories of nightmare renters. In more than 500 postings on the site in the past couple of months, several themes keep coming back — just like bounced rent checks, some landlords might say.

Let’s start with a beef about what may have been beef.

“When I was a Realtor I was acting as a rental agent for an out-of-state owner. Imagine my delight to find the large piece of meat left in the freezer in an apartment left vacant with no electricity for six months. I actually tried to clean it up — there is no cure known to man that I didn’t try to get rid of that smell. Fortunately, the owner was understanding about buying a new fridge.” — Thetabobeta

Rotten food is just one course on a full menu of tribulations described by rental-property owners and managers. The postings have been edited but not checked for accuracy. (FYI: Tenants have a separate message board to gripe about landlords.)

Skipping out on rent

“The absolute worst experience we ever had was two college students referred to us by my husband’s uncle. They trashed the place, stopped paying rent after the first two months and were really, really difficult to evict because it was winter, and at that time the state had laws protecting tenants from being pitched out into the cold. The final insult, of course, was that when they did sneak away in the dark of night, they turned off the heat but not the water — so we had frozen pipes to deal with on top of the garbage and filth.” — Cynical2

“In the last year, I have had two tenants just pack and leave in the middle of the night.” — Sarab landlord

Stealing from the landlord

“I had three rental properties. Worst case was a very rich guy, family lots of $, lots of $! He had utilities cut off, so he tapped into my property’s electrical lines with an extension cord and ran four heaters off it for a month, until it burned through on the new hardwood floor. Then he stripped wallpaper and moldings and sold them at a wood-supply business. He tried to take fixtures but was surprised by another tenant, who called me. He skipped. Family is still very big $ and supports him, I have been told, but they won’t pay any back rent or damage costs. I was out $3,700 for him — the cost of his mountain bike, he told me once.” — noroom

“I have a coin-operated laundry in one complex. The tenants try everything to get free laundry. Foreign change, metal objects, latex gloves with the quarter in the finger hole (thought that was creative). After they got tired of trying to get free laundry, they decided to just take the actual dryer! Just loaded it up, carried it off and threw it down a hill. I hope they enjoyed the 10 bucks they got out of it!” — Norcal Landlord

“We recently bought a new house that was a little out of our league, but being that it was four bedrooms, we figured we could rent out a room for some help with the mortgage, and so we did. We found a tenant who was single, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and didn’t do drugs. He had a cat but said it would stay in the room (I’m allergic). So we accepted him. Long story short, his cat ran around the house, scratched my dog and the furniture, and he did drink, and he did do drugs. The one thing he never did: pay his rent on time. Oh, yeah, and he was married. One day, his estranged wife came to town with a one-way ticket and moved in with no money and a drug problem. Lo and behold, while we were out working all day, she was snooping around the house . . . “collecting” things. First, the boat hitch was missing, and then my shoes. We logged on to our banking account one day and saw there was a check made out to cash, not in our handwriting (and “dollars” was spelled wrong), with the wife’s account number and signature on the back. Needless to say, we evicted them immediately and discovered she had half my wardrobe, and I am still finding things missing!” — Tahoe Tessy

Friends and family

“I had let my cousin (at the request of my aunt) move in, and she sold my water heater, air-conditioning unit, all the fixtures in the house and all my children’s furniture and living-room furniture I had let her use, my riding lawn mower and anything else she could remove. Then she left in the middle of the night. Now, two years later, she has no problem walking into any family gathering and acting like she does not understand why I do not speak with her.” — Amalga

“I had close relatives (too close) living in my house. One moved out, and a girlfriend moved in. I haven’t had any rent money in six months because she is in school, and if I make too much of a fuss they will all be mad at me. This is a no-win situation. I found out not to have dealings with family!!” — Lizzy221

Letting pets run wild

“I rented to a veterinarian who had her boyfriend move in. The two of them started collecting animals. I had agreed to an outside dog only, but now they had four horses, six dogs, and I couldn’t count how many cats! They had fenced in the backyard and put the horses in the yard, right up to the back door, and had the basement full of animals and couldn’t possibly clean up after them. Then she left this guy. He stayed, and the contract was only in her name. We couldn’t get this guy out of our home.” — Wahoo1413

“My boss has a rental that I got put in charge of, and I will never do that again! It was an older couple with their 20-something-year-old daughter, and they lived in filth. They had two dogs, one cat and a chicken that all lived in the house. I guess the animals didn’t like to go outside, so by the time they finally moved out there were mountains of dog, cat and chicken poop in the house. We ended up having to go to court to get them out and then go to court again to get two months of rent and more of a deposit.” — Mandalou

Beyond normal wear and tear

“We had druggies (highly recommended by family/friends in our church!) who glued pennies to the walls, stuffed Cheetos into the shutters, stapled small pieces of cardboard to the inside window facings, disassembled the outdoor flower bed and brought all the bricks inside the house, poured water into the floor furnace, causing it to rust out (we have a 1928 home in Tulsa, Okla., which was beautiful), used the drapery for cleaning rags, used wood staples to anchor a large, outdoor inflatable toy inside the living room and left their drug paraphernalia in the closet when they moved. We’ve spent thousands in cleaning and replacement costs.” — Taken in Tulsa

“The worst case was a house where the renter had driven his four-wheeler into the carpeted living room and repaired it there. When they moved out, they left garbage, dirty diapers on the carpet, children’s drawing in permanent marker on the wall, feces in a plugged toilet, spoiled food in the fridge and, oddly, all sorts of furniture and baby items.” — bulldog7

“I am out of the rental-property business, thank goodness. The worst were the people who paid the first and last months’ rent, then moved in and never paid another dime. After repeated calls and personal visits I had to pay $100 to the constable to get them out. After the constable told them to get out, they shattered the solid-core front door, poured paraffin down all the drains, rewired the electric wiring to short out the whole system (so the fireman told me), threw beer bottles and broke all the windows and screens out, and sold all furniture and appliances and some carpet ripped off the floor. What carpet they did not steal, they poured bleach on, and dumped battery acid on the tile flooring. They put knife holes in all the Sheetrock and left me with original spray paintings. The water had been cut off for months, and they were using 3-pound butter tubs for their toilet, which they left me with. Their dogs left presents inside the house, also.” — bothgone

“Rented to a well-to-do couple with a 2-year-old, solid references (so we thought), and we paid a rental agency to monitor the property and collect the rent. These people paid on time. However, they had a kitchen fire due to the stove being so filthy, thousands of dollars in smoke and fire damage, completely melted the door off the microwave, wouldn’t set up the sprinkler-system timers to water automatically, so the entire yard died, completely tore out shrubs and cracked the upstairs master-bath sink washing a bowling ball. They didn’t have a diaper pail, so they just tossed the wet diapers (from second child born while in the home) in a corner on the carpet of the baby’s room (gag), took every window covering and tore out the alarm system contacts on all the windows. My favorite one: They drove their car through the wall in the garage into the downstairs guest bathroom. All toilets in all three bathrooms had to be replaced because they were stained black. Never could figure that one out.” — Nutso

In a class of their own

“(The tenant) left us with garbage and tons of clothes throughout the house, holes in the walls, carpets destroyed and a large potbellied pig left in the backyard that was very hungry and chased after me.” — Rhonda Landlord

“We fell for a sob story from a prospective tenant, and we got burned. Her husband worked late hours, and she asked if she could take an application with her, (and) along with that could she take the key so they could come by when he got off work at midnight so she could show him the house. She loved the place; they were going to fill out the application and drop it off to us the next day along with a deposit to hold the property until the credit checks came in. We got a strange call from her a few days later, and on a hunch, my husband and I went by the house. Oh, yes, they were moved in all right; everything was unpacked hanging on the wall, and a cat running around. We had squatters. After the cops were called and the eviction process was started, they had the nerve to ask us if they could start over if they gave us the deposit then.” — it ain’t always easy

“I had rented to a mother and two boys (ages 3 and 7) who were supplied to me by the Department of Social Services. They were on a plan (two-year max) to help down-and-out single moms/dads get on their feet. I thought this was a good plan. Then the constant traffic started coming to the house apartment: 10 p.m., 1 p.m., 2:30 p.m., 6:30 p.m. The smell from the apartment was horrible, and I eventually found out she was making and selling crack cocaine from my apartment.” — Pacific Heights

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According to some new surveys, computer networking guys are near the top of the cheater list…right up there with other rich professionals like bankers and lawyers. And 40-something married fathers of two are most likely to cheat in a marriage. As for women cheaters, they are most likely to be stay-at-home moms, teachers, and health care workers.

Those results come from PRWeb.com. Here are some more current stats:

Research shows that up to 3% of all children are the product of infidelity, and most of these children are unknowingly raised by men who are not their biological fathers.

Some cultures have adopted extreme measures to combat infidelity, like DEATH as a punsihment!

Although men are more likely to cheat than women, as women become more financially independent, they act more like men in regard to cheating.

In many cases, infidelity never gets discovered…and the cheater gets away with it.

Emotionally, it IS possible to have feelings for more than one person at a time…but LOVING more than one person is difficult to do.

Office romances continue to increase. Spouses often spend more time with coworkers than with each other.

The initial decision to be unfaithful is rarely ever a rational choice. It is usually driven by one’s emotions. In fact, most people are surprised by their own behavior at the start of an affair.

Emotional infidelity can inflict as much, if not more, hurt, pain and suffering than just the physical act itself.

Unfortunately, many people find a more suitable mate AFTER they are already married.

Biological evidence shows that long-term monogamy is difficult for humans to achieve…but NOT IMPOSSIBLE.

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A former Internal Revenue Service employee has been indicted and arrested for allegedly stealing a taxpayer’s identity.

Domeen Flowers, 48, of Maitland, Fla., was arrested Thursday, in Florida, as a result of an indictment returned by a federal grand jury sitting in Philadelphia, Pa. The indictment charges Flowers, a former IRS employee in Philadelphia, with participating in an alleged identity theft scheme involving the personal information of a taxpayer.

According to the indictment, Flowers used her position with the IRS to make unauthorized computer entries into the IRS’ Integrated Data Retrieval System. After accessing the system, Flowers obtained personal identifying information pertaining to a taxpayer, identified in the indictment only as “E.R.” Flowers allegedly used the information to apply for credits from different credit card companies in E.R.’s name. An initial appearance was held in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla. Flowers was released on bail pending an appearance in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.

If convicted of all charges, Flowers faces between two to 46 years in prison and a fine of up to $1,254,000, a special assessment of $900, and two years of supervised release.

The case was investigated by Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s Philadelphia Field Office and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Floyd J. Miller.

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Nine Border Patrol stations will be closed within the next six months to move 41 agents closer to the southern and northern borders, according to a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

CBP Spokesman Bill Brooks said the interior stations that will be shut are in some instances hundreds of miles from a border. He said the decision is in keeping with a strategy to use resources wisely and “increasingly concentrate our resources on the border.”

Attorney general will not face criminal contempt charge

The stations that will be closed — most of which are in Texas — are:

– Abilene, Texas;

– San Angelo, Texas;

– Riverside, California;

– Dallas, Texas;

– San Antonio, Texas;

– Lubbock, Texas;

– Amarillo, Texas;

– Billings, Montana;

– And Twin Falls, Idaho.

But the Federation for American Immigration Reform said the interior stations are a needed “second line of defense” to track down and apprehend illegal immigrants who make it past international borders and into heavily traveled corridors in the United States.

Brooks said the decision has been in the works for some time, but local officials and the media are now being notified. He said the move was not influenced by any recent news events involving immigration.

Five indicted in Border Patrol agent’s death

There will be a budget savings of $1.3 million a year when the nine posts are closed, according to Brooks.

Administration officials have said regular apprehensions of illegal border crossers are at their lowest levels in decades, indicating the administration’s border strategy is succeeding. That view is not echoed by some in Congress.

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In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.

The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.

The reports also reveal a sometimes uneasy partnership with law enforcement agencies, with the carriers frequently rejecting demands that they considered legally questionable or unjustified. At least one carrier even referred some inappropriate requests to the F.B.I.

The information represents the first time data have been collected nationally on the frequency of cell surveillance by law enforcement. The volume of the requests reported by the carriers — which most likely involve several million subscribers — surprised even some officials who have closely followed the growth of cell surveillance.

“I never expected it to be this massive,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who requested the reports from nine carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, in response to an article in April in The New York Times on law enforcement’s expanded use of cell tracking. Mr. Markey, who is the co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, made the carriers’ responses available to The Times.

While the cell companies did not break down the types of law enforcement agencies collecting the data, they made clear that the widened cell surveillance cut across all levels of government — from run-of-the-mill street crimes handled by local police departments to financial crimes and intelligence investigations at the state and federal levels.

AT&T alone now responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day, with about 230 of them regarded as emergencies that do not require the normal court orders and subpoena. That is roughly triple the number it fielded in 2007, the company said. Law enforcement requests of all kinds have been rising among the other carriers as well, with annual increases of between 12 percent and 16 percent in the last five years. Sprint, which did not break down its figures in as much detail as other carriers, led all companies last year in reporting what amounted to at least 1,500 data requests on average a day.

With the rapid expansion of cell surveillance have come rising concerns — including among carriers — about what legal safeguards are in place to balance law enforcement agencies’ needs for quick data against the privacy rights of consumers.

Legal conflicts between those competing needs have flared before, but usually on national security matters. In 2006, phone companies that cooperated in the Bush administration’s secret program of eavesdropping on suspicious international communications without court warrants were sued, and ultimately were given immunity by Congress with the backing of the courts. The next year, the F.B.I. was widely criticized for improperly using emergency letters to the phone companies to gather records on thousands of phone numbers in counterterrorism investigations that did not involve emergencies.

Under federal law, the carriers said they generally required a search warrant, a court order or a formal subpoena to release information about a subscriber. But in cases that law enforcement officials deem an emergency, a less formal request is often enough. Moreover, rapid technological changes in cellphones have blurred the lines on what is legally required to get data — particularly the use of GPS systems to identify the location of phones.

As cell surveillance becomes a seemingly routine part of police work, Mr. Markey said in an interview that he worried that “digital dragnets” threatened to compromise the privacy of many customers. “There’s a real danger we’ve already crossed the line,” he said.

With the rising prevalence of cellphones, officials at all levels of law enforcement say cell tracking represents a powerful tool to find suspects, follow leads, identify associates and cull information on a wide range of crimes.

“At every crime scene, there’s some type of mobile device,” said Peter Modafferi, chief of detectives for the Rockland County district attorney’s office in New York, who also works on investigative policies and operations with the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The need for the police to exploit that technology “has grown tremendously, and it’s absolutely vital,” he said in an interview.

The surging use of cell surveillance was also reflected in the bills the wireless carriers reported sending to law enforcement agencies to cover their costs in some of the tracking operations. AT&T, for one, said it collected $8.3 million last year compared with $2.8 million in 2007, and other carriers reported similar increases in billings.

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With at least 30 million surveillance cameras watching Americans every day, one aspect of the world of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has already come to pass, and more is on the way. In the next two years, for example, the FBI plans to test a nationwide database for searching iris scans to more quickly identify persons “of interest” to the government. The human iris, which is the doughnut-shaped, colored part of the eye that surrounds the black pupil, exhibits a pattern unique to each individual, just as fingerprints do, and iris recognition has been a staple of science fiction stories and films for years.

Iris scanning is part of the FBI’s Next-Generation Identification system, a multiyear $1 billion program built by Lockheed Martin and already well underway for several years, which will expand the FBI’s server capacity to allow for rapid matching not only of iris scans, but also of additional physical identifiers, such as fingerprints, palm prints and facial images. The FBI intends to test the system in conjunction with prisons, some of which already use iris scans to track prisoners and prevent mistakes of identification. According to the FBI, the time for urgent criminal fingerprint searches will eventually be reduced from 2 hours to 10 minutes, while the use of iris scans and other markers should ensure greater accuracy.

Although privacy advocates have little criticism of the use of iris scanning in correctional settings, the fact that the FBI and state prison officials are using a database owned and maintained by a private corporation, BI2 Technologies, gives many pause. Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, points out that privately-run databases, including well-encrypted ones at banks and other financial businesses, have experienced serious data breaches exposing private customer information, and that leaks of fingerprints or iris scans would be potentially much more serious. “You can change your credit card data. But you can’t change your biometric data.”

And in light of the fact that the New York Police Department, in cahoots with major Wall Street banks and finance firms, used security cameras to identify Occupy Wall Street protesters, suspicions that iris scans might be used to target non-criminals who are disliked by powerful cannot be dismissed out of hand.

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When most teens are entering high school, Rosalio (Bart) Reta was killing. At age 13, the Laredo, Texas, native was brought into the notorious Zetas drug cartel across the border in Mexico, where he committed his first murder, he says.

Groomed to be an assassin, Reta worked as a sicario for the crime syndicate, carrying out hits and kidnappings as part of a three-man cell based in Laredo. The pay was good — between $10,000 and $50,000 per hit, plus a weekly retainer and occasional gifts of posh cars. But that’s not what drew him in, Reta says.

“It didn’t even start like that. I was doing good in school. I had no problems. I just, I don’t know, in the blink of an eye, everything went sour,” he tells Keith Boag of CBC’s The National in a prison interview in Texas.

And over the next four years, he says, he killed more than 30 people, mostly in Mexico but also in the United States. He’s now serving a 70-year sentence in a Texas penitentiary.

In his interview with CBC News, Reta reveals some of the inner workings of one of Mexico’s most depraved and violent drug cartels.

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In its first ever transparency report, Twitter reported Monday that the United States leads the pack when it comes to government demands for user data, having filed 679 requests in the first half of the year.

Worldwide, Twitter said it has received more government demands for data in the first six months of this year than all of last year.

In Twitter’s Transparency Report, it said it has complied with 75 percent of user-data disclosure demands by producing “some or all information” requested by U.S. authorities. Globally, the average was 63 percent.

Data previous to 2012 was not available. Twitter said it notifies its users of government demands “unless prohibited by law.”

The closest country behind the United States was Japan, which lodged 98 requests with a 20 percent Twitter compliance rate. The United Kingdom and Canada came in with 11 requests, with an 18 percent compliance rate. All of the other countries in the 23-nation Twitter report registered with less than 10 government demands.

“We’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011,” Twitter said on its blog.

The disclosure follows Google’s lead — nearly two years ago, when the search giant turned heads by publishing a treasure trove of data surrounding government demands for user data, in addition to information on the number of takedown notices connected to copyright infringement.

“Wednesday marks Independence Day here in the United States. Beyond the fireworks and barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a chance to do so themselves,” Twitter said.

The Twitter report came the same day a New York state judge ordered the San Francisco-based microblogging site to divulge the tweets and account information allegedly connected to an Occupy protester.

Twitter did not say whether, at least in the United States, the authorities presented probable-cause warrants for user data. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr.’s ruling Monday did not require local prosecutors to have probable cause to get the tweets and accompanying account information of an Occupy protester.

The company, however, listed a few reasons why it does not acquiesce to all government-issued, user-data requests.

“We do not comply with requests that fail to identify a Twitter user account. We may seek to narrow requests that are overly broad. In other cases, users may have challenged the requests after we’ve notified them,” Twitter said. Most famously, Twitter successfully fought to allow individuals being investigated for their connections to WikiLeaks to challenge requests for their Twitter data.

In a separate reporting category, Twitter said it received 3,378 requests to remove copyrighted material from Twitter in the United States for the first half of the year. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires internet service providers to remove works, at the copyright holder’s request, to avoid legal liability.

Overall, Twitter said it removed 38 percent of the material specified in the takedown requests. Among other reasons, Twitter said it does not comply with all requests because sometimes they “fail to provide sufficient information” or were “misfiled.”

Twitter also reported that it did not comply with any of the handful of requests from France, Greece, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom to remove content that is illegal in those nations.

Twitter’s not the first to follow Google’s transparency lead – Dropbox, LinkedIn, SpiderOak and SonicNet beat Twitter to it.

Among those who ought to be next: Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Yahoo, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Microsoft.

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