THERMAL, Calif. (AP) — They say crime doesn’t pay. For one robber in California, it did – but not much. Authorities in Riverside County say a woman with a gun robbed 11 customers at a market and got away with $6. A Sheriff’s Department statement says the woman was armed with a semi-automatic pistol when she went to La Chicanita Market in the town of Thermal on Tuesday afternoon. Deputy Herlinda Valenzuela says the woman confronted 10 customers in the store and also demanded money from one person who was entering the market. She then fled in an old car. Nobody was hurt. — Information from: The Press-Enterprise, http://www.pe.com
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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EVESHAM, N.J. (AP) — Police said a cook put a body hair in the bagel sandwich of a police officer who had given him tickets in the past. The cook was arrested Feb. 21 in the kitchen of Good Foods to Go in Evesham. The police officer ticketed the cook in March 2009 when he failed to pull over for a traffic violation. The cook spent four hours in jail before his wife bailed him out, and was fired from his job. The Courier-Post of Cherry Hill reports police asked them not to report the incident for fear of copycat crimes. The paper published the story anyway. — Information from: Courier-Post, http://www.courierpostonline.com/
March 4, 2010 | Posted in
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SINGAPORE (AP) — Singapore said it will maintain a ban on chewing gum sales, a policy that has helped shape the city-state’s international image as a tightly controlled, squeaky-clean island. The ban, first imposed in 1992, is necessary to reduce gum-related litter and vandalism, Mohamad Maliki Bin Osman, parliamentary secretary of the national development ministry, told lawmakers Thursday. “We remain concerned that lifting the ban could result in chewing gum litter resurfacing as a problem,” Mohamad said. “The government stands by its decision to ban chewing gum as the rationale is based on maintaining a clean and comfortable living environment.” Singapore has sought in recent years to cultivate a more cosmopolitan, more hip image in a bid to attract foreign investment and tourists. The nation of 5 million residents opened its first casino last month and began hosting Formula One races in 2008. But the country maintains strict laws against public demonstrations and speech about religion and race. Punishment for minor crimes such as vandalism can include canings, and drug smugglers are often hanged. Denise Phua Lay Peng, a member of parliament from the ruling People’s Action Party, called on the government to allow citizens more freedom. “Let Singaporeans be accountable for the consequences, and not let our behavior be shaped by so many sticks,” Phua said. “If Singaporeans were seeking liberty in so many areas and the government does concede in some of these areas, why not liberalize the chewing gum ban?” Phua also expressed frustration that Singapore is so well-known internationally for banning gum. A clean city is more important than the freedom to chew gum, Mohamad said, adding that before the ban gobs of gum had stopped subway doors from closing, creating delays. “Our efforts at creating a clean, green and safe living environment have garnered much more international acclaim than criticisms of the ban of chewing gum,” he said. The ban was modified in 2004 to allow sales of gum that have medicinal value. — Associated Press writer Chun Han Wong contributed to this report.
March 4, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — President Barack Obama is going to help TV’s “America’s Most Wanted” mark the milestone broadcast of its 1,000th episode. Obama will be interviewed by the show’s host, John Walsh, on the episode airing 9 p.m. EST Saturday on Fox. The president will discuss the show’s impact in its 22 years as well as his administration’s anti-crime initiatives, including those involving white-collar crime, Fox said Wednesday. Walsh, whose 6-year-old son Adam was abducted and killed in 1981, has been host of “America’s Most Wanted” since its start. According to Fox, the show has helped capture more than 1,100 fugitives and reunited 43 missing children with their families.
March 3, 2010 | Posted in
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MADRID (AP) — Spanish authorities who dismantled a network of up to 12.7 million virus-infected, data-stealing computers said Wednesday the mastermind of the scam remains a mystery, even though three alleged ringleaders have been arrested. The “botnet” of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, police said. The tainted computers stole credit card numbers and online banking credentials. Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, arrested three young Spaniards last month as the alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. Spanish authorities are on the trail of a fourth suspect who might be Venezuelan, said Juan Salon of the Spanish Civil Guard’s cybercrime unit. But the people in custody did not design the malicious software behind the grid; rather they just bought it on the black market, Salon told a news conference called to detail the smashing of the network. “We have not arrested the creator of the botnet. We have arrested the administrators of the botnet, the ones who spread it and were administering and controlling it,” Salon said. He declined to say how much money might have been plundered or name companies whose computers had been compromised. Botnets are networks of infected PCs that have been hijacked from their owners, often without their knowledge, and put into the control of criminals. Linked together, the machines supply an enormous amount of computing power to spammers, identity thieves and Internet attackers. There are an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 operating today and this one was the biggest one ever brought down, said Jose Antonio Berrocal, head of the Civil Guard’s economic and technological crimes unit. The Mariposa botnet spread to more than 190 countries, according to researchers. It also appears to be far more sophisticated than the botnet that was used to hack into Google Inc. and other companies in the attack that led Google to threaten to pull out of China. — AP correspondent Jordan Robertson contributed to this report from San Francisco, California.
March 3, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — What O.J. Simpson wore when he was acquitted in 1995 of murdering his ex-wife and her friend was the suit seen around the world during one of the most watched televised moments in history. But the Smithsonian Institution, America’s repository of historical artifacts rejected it Tuesday as inappropriate for their collection. Announcement of the museum’s snub came the morning after a California judge approved the donation as the solution to a 13-year court battle over the carefully tailored tan suit, white shirt and yellow and tan tie. The ensemble has been held by Simpson’s former sports agent, Mike Gilbert. Fred Goldman, the father of the man Simpson was accused of killing in 1994, had been fighting Gilbert for the suit, which Simpson has said was stolen from him. The suit was indirectly responsible for Simpson’s current predicament: The former NFL star is imprisoned in Nevada for a bungled effort to reclaim items of his memorabilia from a Las Vegas hotel room. Simpson had been told the suit was in the room and was being offered for sale, along with other artifacts of his life. It turned out the suit wasn’t there. The Smithsonian announced its decision with a terse announcement on its Web site. “The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will not be collecting O.J. Simpson’s suit,” it said. “The decision was made by the museum’s curators together with the director.” Gilbert, who has the suit in storage, said he was disappointed with the decision. “Whether we like it or not, it’s part of American history,” he said. “I’m disappointed that they didn’t wait to hear from me and consider my vision of how it should be displayed.” Attorney Ronald P. Slates, who represents Simpson, said he’s keeping his client informed about the donation effort. Superior Court Judge Joseph S. Biderman consulted Simpson by phone Monday, then approved Gilbert’s plan after Simpson said he would agree as long as no one made any money. “I’m saddened by the fact that the foremost museum in America has refused this very important item in the history of American jurisprudence,” Slates said. “Regardless of one’s feelings about Mr. Simpson, his acquittal by a jury of his peers on Oct. 3, 1995 was of great significance and is widely talked about to this day.” Even then-President Bill Clinton watched on television when the jury announced the acquittal in the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman after a yearlong trial. The museum’s spokeswoman, Linda St. Thomas, said curators consider several criteria for accepting donations, including whether an item has historical significance, whether it is needed to complete a collection or is needed for research. “In this case, they knew it was not appropriate for the collection,” she said. Attorney David Cook, who represents Fred Goldman, said he was sure other institutions would want the suit. “We’re going to hang this suit in America’s closet and there will be no lack of people who want it,” Cook said. “It’s a matter of finding the right fit.” He said he already has some ideas including two Washington, D.C., museums: the Newseum, which has a collection on historical news events, and the Museum of Crime and Punishment. Slates said he may suggest that it go to the University of Southern California, where Simpson made his mark as a star football player. Gilbert, who was placed in charge of facilitating the donation, said he would consider all suggestions. He was given 30 days to report back to the judge, and could receive another 30 days if an agreement hasn’t been reached by then.
March 2, 2010 | Posted in
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Authorities have smashed one of the world’s biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs. The “botnet” of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators. Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries. Spanish authorities have planned a news conference for Wednesday in Madrid. The arrests are significant because the masterminds behind the biggest botnets aren’t often taken down. And the story of investigators’ hunt for them offers a rare glimpse at the tactics used to trace the origin of computer crimes. Also, the suspects go against the stereotype of genius programmers often associated with cyber crime. The suspects weren’t brilliant hackers but had underworld contacts who helped them build and operate the botnet, Cesar Lorenza, a captain with Spain’s Guardia Civil, which is investigating the case, told The Associated Press. Investigators were examining bank records and seized computers to determine how much money the criminals made. “They’re not like these people from the Russian mafia or Eastern European mafia who like to have sports cars and good watches and good suits – the most frightening thing is they are normal people who are earning a lot of money with cybercrime,” Lorenza said. The three suspects were described as Spanish citizens with no criminal records. They weren’t named and their mug shots weren’t released, which Lorenza said is standard in Spain to protect the privacy of defendants. They face up to six years in prison if convicted of hacking charges. Authorities identified them by their Internet handles and their ages: “netkairo,” 31; “jonyloleante,” 30; and “ostiator,” 25. Botnets are networks of infected PCs that have been hijacked from their owners, often without their knowledge, and put into the control of criminals. Linked together, the machines supply an enormous amount of computing power to spammers, identity thieves, and Internet attackers. The Mariposa botnet, which has been dismantled, was easily one of the world’s biggest. It spread to more than 190 countries, according to researchers. It also appears to be far more sophisticated than the botnet that was used to hack into Google Inc. and other companies in the attack that led Google to threaten to pull out of China. The researchers that helped take down Mariposa first started looking at it in the spring of 2009. Chris Davis, CEO of Ottawa-based Defence Intelligence, said he noticed the infections when they appeared on networks of some of his firm’s clients, including pharmaceutical companies and banks. It wasn’t until several months later that he realized the infections were part of something much bigger. After seeing that some of the servers used to control computers in the botnet were located in Spain, Davis and researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center joined with software firm Panda Security, which is headquartered in Bilbao, Spain. The investigators caught a few lucky breaks. For one, the suspects used Internet services that wound up cooperating with investigators. That isn’t always the case. Critically, one suspect also made direct connections from his own computer to try and reclaim control of his botnet after authorities took it down around Christmas. Investigators were able to identify him based on that traffic. They were able to back up their claims with records from domains he registered where he would eventually host malicious content. It turned out that the botnet runners had infected computers by instant-messaging malicious links to contacts on infected computers. They also got viruses onto removable thumb drives and through peer-to-peer networks. The program used to create the botnet was known as Mariposa, from the Spanish word for “butterfly.” “I don’t think there’s anything about this guy that makes him smarter than any of the other botnet guys, but the (Mariposa) software, it’s very professional, it’s very effective,” said Pedro Bustamante, senior research adviser with Panda Security. “It came alive and started spreading and it got bigger than him.” While arrests of people accused of running smaller botnets are fairly common, the biggest botnet leaders are rarely nabbed. That’s partly because it’s easy for criminals to hide their identities by disguising the source of their Internet traffic. Often, every computing resource they use is stolen. For instance, there have been no busts yet in the spread of the Conficker worm, which infected 3 million to 12 million PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system and caused widespread fear that it could be used as a kind of Internet super weapon. The Conficker botnet is still active, but is closely watched by security researchers. The infected computers have so far been used to make money in ordinary ways, pumping out spam and spreading fake antivirus software.
March 2, 2010 | Posted in
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BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s highest court on Tuesday overturned a law that let anti-terror authorities retain data on telephone calls and e-mails, saying it posed a “grave intrusion” to personal privacy rights and must be revised. The court ruling was the latest to sharply criticize a major initiative by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and one of the strongest steps yet defending citizen rights from post-Sept. 11 terror-fighting measures. The ruling comes amid a European-wide attempt to set limits on the digital sphere, that includes disputes with Google Inc. over photographing citizens for its Street View maps. The Karlsruhe-based Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the law violated Germans’ constitutional right to private correspondence and failed to balance privacy rights against the need to provide security. It did not, however, rule out data retention in principle. The law had ordered that all data – except content – from phone calls and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities, who could probe who contacted whom, from where and for how long. “The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data,” the court said, adding that “such retention represents an especially grave intrusion.” The court said because citizens did not notice the data was being retained it caused “a vague and threatening sense of being watched.” Nearly 35,000 Germans had appealed to the court to overturn the law, which stems from a 2006 European Union anti-terrorism directive requiring telecommunications companies to retain phone data and Internet logs for a minimum of six months in case they are needed for criminal investigations. Civil rights groups had fiercely opposed the law, arguing that even excluding the content of phone calls and e-mails could allow authorities too deep a view into their personal sphere. “Massive amounts of data about German citizens who pose no threat and are not suspects is being retained,” Germany’s commissioner for data security issues, Peter Schaar, told ARD television. Security experts argued the information is crucial to being able to trace crimes involving heavy use of the Internet, including tracking terror networks and child pornography rings. While the court upheld the EU directive as necessary to fight terror, it took issue with how the German law had interpreted it and ordered further restrictions on access to the data. Changes ordered by the court included granting access to the data only by court order and only in the event of “concrete and imminent danger.” The court further insisted the information be stored in the private sector so it was not concentrated in one spot. Germans, in particular, are sensitive to privacy issues, based on their experiences under the Nazis as well as the former East Germany’s Communist dictatorships, where information on individuals was collected and abused by the state.
March 2, 2010 | Posted in
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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A Baltimore inmate who bluffed his way out of prison probably wouldn’t have tricked guards if they had eye-scanners such as those being installed at dozens of jails nationwide. The federal government is paying for the scanners as part of an effort to build a nearly foolproof identification system to put a stop to such escapes. “After this occurrence, we will be studying whatever we can do to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” including iris scanners, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Maryland Division of Corrections, which oversees the facility that mistakenly released Raymond Taylor. Taylor was serving three life sentences for shooting his ex-girlfriend and her two teenage daughters. He impersonated his cellmate Thursday and was released. He was arrested the following day in West Virginia. The eye-scanning program looks to put an end to such deception. The U.S. Justice Department has given a $500,000 grant to the National Sheriff’s Association, which is doling out the money through $10,000 grants to about 45 agencies across the country that will create a national database that better identifies, registers and tracks inmates, said Fred Wilson, who is leading the association’s effort. Eye-scanners have been used for years by a few jails, the U.S. military, some European airports and private companies, but they remain rare, primarily because of the cost. “While this technology has been around generally for 10 to 15 years, it just hasn’t gotten into the mainstream yet,” Wilson said. “You have to remember that the average law enforcement agency is very small and they can’t afford this stuff.” Most of the $10,000 grants paid for the equipment and a small portion went toward training. The sheriff’s association teamed with Plymouth, Mass.-based scanner company Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies and picked the agencies from more than 400 that were interested in installing scanners. In picking jails, officials looked to spread machines across the country and place them in spots with the technological know-how to use them. The chosen agencies ranged from big operations like the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department and Las Vegas metro police to small departments such as in Story County, Iowa, and Rutland County, Vt. Officers at the Story County jail will start using their scanner soon. “If we can get every state involved in this, that would be tremendous. Just like the fingerprint databases,” Story County Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald said. In Davis County, Utah, near Salt Lake City, Chief Deputy Bob Yeaman said his scanner will check prisoners whenever they come or go. “It’s probably every jail commander’s worst nightmare to release the wrong person,” Yeaman said. For law enforcement, speed is the biggest advantage eye-scanning has over fingerprints. The FBI has the fingerprints and criminal history of about 65 million people in its database. Sheriffs complain that a fingerprint search results can take hours or even days, but results are nearly instant with an iris scan. “Within 15 seconds you can get an identification back on who this is,” Fitzgerald said. Scanning inmates is quick, too. A person simply looks into a camera, which uses infrared light to illuminate and map the iris. Each iris is unique and contains about six times more features than a fingerprint. Despite its advantages, creating an iris scanning database could raise privacy concerns, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group in Washington. Rotenberg said prisons often are testing grounds for new technologies later used in the general public. What might make sense behind barbed wire could be seen as intrusive in the free world and it’s hard to foresee what those problems could be, he said. Fingerprints, though, will remain an important tool for agencies because scans have limitations. One is that only the living can use the system because irises immediately break down when people die, and fingerprints will remain essential for investigators as evidence at crime scenes, said Patricia Lawton, senior development officer at Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies. One person sold on the technology is Vincent Guarini, warden at the Lancaster County Prison in Pennsylvania. In 1996, the prison became the first in the nation to install an iris scanner after, like in Maryland, an inmate claimed to be his cellmate and was released. He too was later caught. “From then on, I said we would never, ever do this again,” Guarini said. “And I want some kind of mechanism, technology, device whatever and take the human element out of it.”
February 27, 2010 | Posted in
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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A 37-year-old Salt Lake City woman acknowledged hitting her husband in the head with a hammer three years ago after blindfolding him and promising a surprise. Amy Teresa Ricks pleaded guilty to second-degree felony aggravated assault on Tuesday. Prosecutors have agreed to reduce the conviction to a third-degree felony after Ricks completes probation. Prosecutors also agreed to let Ricks seek expungement of the crime after seven years. Sentencing is set for April 19. Ricks’ husband suffered minor injuries in the May 2007 attack. Ricks’ defense attorney says the two are still married but are separated. — Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com
February 25, 2010 | Posted in
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