Had a great time—as usual—with Thorne & Cross on Carnival Macabre talking Stalkers, Writing, and the next Jake Longly story (#5) THE OC.
https://carnivalmacabre.libsyn.com/dp-lyles-thoughts-on-stalkers-writing-and-his-new-book-the-oc
THE OC Details and Pre-Order: http://www.dplylemd.com/book-details/the-oc.html
Each person possesses their own unique fingerprint pattern. No two prints have ever been found to be the same. This includes identical twins, who have the same DNA profile but different fingerprints. Not sure why this is, but it is. This means fingerprints are the perfect tool for identification and comparison.
But fingerprint analysis has a problem. It is subjective, in that it depends on the skill and dedication of the examiner. Another important factor is the quality of the print obtained from a crime scene. Those done in the police station, where the suspect’s prints are rolled in ink or obtained by a digital scanner, are clean and clear for the most part. Each of the ridges is easily visible and all of the nuances of prints are readily apparent. But at the crime scene, criminals refuse to cooperate in that way. They leave behind partial, smeared, and unclear prints that make analysis difficult. They also leave prints on surfaces that aren’t the best for retaining latent prints.
This makes the examination process tedious, time-consuming, and difficult. But what if computer techniques could enhance an unclear or partial print to the point that it could be compared by the computer itself? This would narrow the choices and lighten the burden on examiners so they would have more time to focus on the details and make sure the print indeed matched or didn’t.
A new technique for automating fingerprint analysis is under development. It’s pretty cool and promises to be helpful.
Can someone’s fingerprint be reproduced by 3-D printing technology and if so can it be used to unlock a cell phone? This is intriguing science and currently Professor Anil Jain at Michigan State University is looking into developing this technology. One of the problems is that many cellphone fingerprint security measures require not only pattern recognition but a certain degree of electrical conductivity that is natural to human skin. How to reproduce this in a 3-D printed model is one of the hurdles Professor Jain must overcome. But it is intriguing and we will see how it all shakes out.
BIO: Douglas White leads the National Software Reference Library project for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He has 25 years of experience with distributed systems, distributed databases and telecommunication protocols, real time biomonitoring, real time video processing, system administration and network monitoring. He holds both a B.A and M.S. in computer science from Hood College. He has
given lectures for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the High Technology Crime Investigation Association, the Digital Forensic Research Workshop and other digital forensic conferences.
Link will go live Saturday 2-4-17 at 10 a.m. Pacific
LINKS:
Digital Forensics Rescues Retro Video Games and Software: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/09/digital-forensics-rescues-retro-video-games-and-software
NSRL website: www.nsrl.nist.gov
NIST Forensics topics: www.nist.gov/forensics
Video lecture on the Cabrinety-NSRL effort: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/outreach/tops/white/white.html
Interview that includes the FDA story: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/05/life-saving-the-national-software-reference-library/
Blogs by SUL staff including Henry Lowood and Charlotte Thai: https://Howtheygotgame.stanford.edu
Video: The NSRL Library: http://www.nsrl.nist.gov/video/nsrl_shelf_walk.mp4
USING SMARTPHONES TO DEFEAT NOT-SO-SMART CRIMINALS
My boss, the supervisor of our forensic unit, insists that soon we will be able to process an entire crime scene with nothing but a smartphone. Everything from photographs to sketching to measuring to note-taking, all on a 2 ½ x 5” flat item which one needs reading glasses to see unless one is under fifty which I, alas, will never be again.
Most phones now come with 10 or 12 megapixel cameras, which are more than sufficient for forensic purposes. You can get attachments for tripods and flashes. My boss can open and close the shutter from his Apple Watch (important for taking ninety-degree close-ups of fingerprints or tire tracks where the slightest vibration could blur the details).
Simply browsing through the tablet he got us for crime scene work and nagged us for a few months to use before he finally gave up, I find:
The flashlight app. Of course. (I was at a crime scene yesterday where the two young men were trying to plug my USB into the video system, cleverly hidden in the ceiling panels. It’s dark up there, of course, and they were stymied as they had never downloaded a flashlight to their relatively new phones. I pulled my mini-Mag out of my pocket and suggested they use an actual flashlight. Sometimes us old chicks rule.)
Pill Identifier, with which you can enter the color and shape of a medication and it will help you narrow down to the name of the drug, then link to information on purpose, dosage, side effects and drug interactions.
Photo Measures, which allows you to take a photo of a room and then annotate it with measurements. This way my boss, the detectives, the prosecutors and the jury no longer have to suffer through trying to decipher my hastily scribbled sketches of uneven walls and amorphous blobs representing the pit couch. I can take a photo of the room and write the dimensions right over the picture, then add the feet and inches from the south wall to the bloody knife on the floor. The only catch is you still have to take the measurements yourself.
And for that, we have RoomScanPro. Simply start it up, give each room a name like ‘dining’, hold the phone against each wall, in order but at any particular spot on the wall until you’ve gone around the whole room. The app will create a floor plan including measurements. Do a complete walk-through and it will give you the whole house. Be warned, however, that these apps may only be accurate to half a foot, so that you could wind up with an attorney grilling you how the murder weapon could have been five and a half inches from the victim’s body instead of six.
For traffic incidents, Vehicle Identification System can give you pictures of nearly every make and model available in the last decade to aid witnesses in describing the getaway car. And Cargo Decoder can translate the four-digit DOT code on a truck’s placard to tell you what kind of materials they’re hauling.
There are a number of panoramic photo apps, so that you can quickly scan a 360° shot of the crime scene as is before EMTs, firemen, reporters, angry mobs or bigwig looky-lous breach your perimeter.
So the next time you see a team processing a crime scene it might not only be the nerdy young guy using the newfangled gadgets to do the job. It might be the grizzled old detective using a smartphone and a rubber-tipped stylus.
And reading glasses.
Lisa Black has spent over 20 years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police dept. Her books have been translated into 6 languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s List and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series.
The email showed up in my Inbox one morning with the subject line: I have a genuine proposal of great benefit to you.
Yeah, that sounds totally genuine.
And thus I entered the exciting and dangerous world of scambaiting. Except it’s more tedious than exciting, and not too dangerous when the perpetrators sit on the other side of the planet and can’t afford air fare.
I hate scammers. I hate Rachael from Credit Card Services who calls twice a day (though sometimes she’s Bridget, and sometime Scott, and once in a while she’s Carmen) trying to get me to hand over my credit card numbers. I hate the emails that tell me I won a lottery I never entered in a country I’ve never been to. I am just waiting for some kid to call me pretending to be a grandson I don’t have, asking for bail money to get out of some totally bogus charge in Greece. And the fake Microsoft people are still trying to convince me that my computer is sending out error messages.
So I declared war.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the Do Not Call lists, state or federal, do nothing. I continue to report each and every call to them in the hopes of making any charges they do someday press just that tiny bit more massive. The email scammers are almost always outside our borders, sending false phone numbers to your caller ID, and no one has time to track them down. Therefore, all you can do to strike a glancing blow for Cosmic Justice is: Waste their time. Every minute they spend sending you an email or sitting on the phone writing down fictitious credit card numbers is a minute they can’t spend scamming some poor soul who might actually fall for it.
There are entire websites dedicated to people’s efforts to derail these scammers, and they are a font of good information and some great laughs. Following their advice I set up a new, free email account and instantly became Chloe, a pretty twenty-two year old, complete with a fetching photo from MS Office Clipart. (This wasn’t just wishful thinking—I thought her youth might explain her apparent naiveté in believing every story sent to her.) Chloe lives in a state I’ve never been to and works hard as a waitress at a Waffle House. I borrowed the phone number of Rachael from Credit Card Services, using the town it comes back to in a reverse lookup search—it doesn’t matter, since scammers won’t pay the long distance phone bill to actually call it. I invented a non-existent address on a real road with a real zip code.
Then I started writing back. I copied the body only of the emails that came to my legitimate email address and responded—they send out too many at a time to notice one coming back from an address they didn’t contact. I told Ms. Liza Wong from Malaysia that I would be happy to help distribute the dead philanthropist’s money to those less fortunate, and MegaMillions winner Jim McCullen that I would accept the responsibility of disbursing his winnings. I wrote back to a helpful FBI agent in New York (though his IP address said Madagascar) who had found a package of 4.1 million dollars with my name on it (literally) and just needed me to fill out some forms to complete delivery. I found this so helpful of him. Who says the federal government is suspicious and obstructive and overly concerned with things like income tax payments?
A co-worker of mine drew the short straw and thus has been trained in the art of downloading computers to find stashes of child porn and other crimes. She has become my go-to person with tentative questions about How This Stuff Actually Works. Unfortunately whenever I ask her something she tends to burst into Swahili, throwing around terms like ‘data dump’ and ‘NTFS access’. I asked her about the IP addresses for the three emails above (the scambaiters’ site taught me how to find those), since the first two said they were in other countries but their IPs came back to the US and Canada. She said they can route through other people’s IPs. I always believed McGee on NCIS tracing an email that bounces through IPs all over the world to be Hollywood hyperbole, but it turns out to be somewhat accurate. My co-worker can’t do it, perhaps because my city can’t afford the cool flat-screens, but it can certainly be done. But, she said, they would need the cooperation of the host IPs. Aha, I said. Unless they hacked them, she said. Oh, I sighed.
I GoogleEarthed (you know what I mean) my three IPs and found that the US one sat on the edge of a closed Air Force base (yikes) and the other two bordered high schools. My co-worker said they were probably using the free wi-fi—the same reason you see cars in the Starbucks parking lot when the place isn’t even open.
Nothing all that exciting has happened yet. The FBI agent never wrote back about my box of cash. The other two put me in touch with their banker, who sent me a very professional looking email detailing how, since I live in neither England or Malaysia, I have to deposit a sum to open a ‘temporal account’ to which my large windfall can then be deposited. The UK bank wants $1200, and the Malaysian one a more reasonable $640. I pleaded poverty (it would take my 22-year-old months to save that from her Waffle House paychecks!) and put them in touch with my banker at my fictional savings & loan. Chloe’s banker is an old family friend and looking out for the sweet girl’s interests, which is why he sent their bankers his own forms, which they must complete and return before they can be allowed to make a deposit at his fine institution. This will be difficult since the form demands to know things like your HBG number, which stands for “I Have No Idea, I Just Made It Up.” If they somehow work their way through this impossible task, then they may encounter further problems trying to fax it to another of Rachael from Card Services’ numbers.
Apparently both bankers found this daunting enough to give up on Miss Chloe, as neither she nor her bank manager have heard from them again. Jim McCullar gave up as well. Liza Wong hung in the longest with a forlorn, ‘have you heard from the bank, what’s going on?’ email.
I did have more success with today’s call from the persistent “Carmen” from “Credit Card Services.” They happened to call as I sat in front of my computer. Did you know you can Google “fake credit card number generator” and bring up a list of numbers for the major agencies? I kept a very polite representative on the phone for nearly fifteen minutes as she tried to ‘verify my balances’. I prepared to insist that, of course those are my correct credit card numbers, I’m looking right at them, but instead after a while she simply, quietly, failed to return from Hold.
But somewhere in the country, some other poor telephone owner got an extra ten minutes of peace this afternoon.
They’re welcome.
Close to the Bone hits forensic scientist Theresa MacLean where it hurts, bringing death and destruction to the one place where she should feel the most safe—the medical examiner’s office in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has worked for the past fifteen years of her life. Theresa returns in the wee hours after working a routine crime scene, only to find the body of one of her deskmen slowly cooling with the word “Confess” written in his blood. His partner is missing and presumed guilty, but Theresa isn’t so sure. The body count begins to rise but for once these victims aren’t strangers—they are Theresa’s friends and colleagues, and everyone in the building, herself included, has a place on the hit list.
Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she’s a certified latent print examiner and CSI for the Cape Coral Police Department in Florida. Her books have been translated into six languages and one reached the NYT mass market bestseller’s list.
Universal Law against Cyber Crime Is What We Need
How are cyber crimes perpetuated?
There are many ways in which cyber crimes are perpetrated and technologically savvy attackers are indeed inventing newer ones to outwit law enforcement too. However, the main kind is as follows:
1. Unauthorized or unsolicited access to computer systems or networks with malicious intentions or motives also termed hacking
2. Data theft of electronically stored information
3. Stratified e-mail bombardment
4. Manipulating electronic data before and after processing
5. Salami attacks mostly on financial and economic data
6. Denial of Service Attacks
7. Virus or worm attacks
8. Trojan Horse or data infiltration to cause damages, or suspension of services
How are they detected?
Usually, cyber crimes are detected when the individual or institution notices large sums of money are unreasonably withdrawn from their accounts, or their system has become corrupted or malfunctioning. Complaints filed with the relevant Cyber Cell Departments or law enforcement are also ways of detection such genre of crimes. Many new anti cyber crime technology, tools and softwares are now being provided and installed which are able to detect cyber crimes sometimes even before the real damage sets in. Anti Virus Software (AVS) and other lingering software in computer systems are able to detect and resolve many instances of illegal entry.
Universal laws and not country- specific laws are the need of hour for addressing cyber crimes:
Another major reason why there needs to be universal laws against cyber crimes is that there may be some different sets of cyber laws enacted and enforced by different countries of the world. While the EU may have one set of laws, the Middle East may have another and the Far East yet another, with the Americas, distinguishing itself with the fourth set of different regulatory regimes regarding cybercrimes and its treatment. Thus, enforcement of laws and bringing culprits or perpetrators before the due process of law would be a very difficult proposition, especially if this is of trans border kind with many conflicting enactment, laws and procedures. With country specific laws, it is also difficult to agree on which laws the violators could be tried and punished- the laws of the cyber crime perpetrating country, the laws of the victim’s country or the preponderance of global laws since the crimes were committed on global internet highway.
There is every possibility that with nebulous laws, the perpetrators could stand good chance of going scot free, due to lack of evidence and even lack of law enforcement techniques.
But if there is preponderance of global set of cyber security laws and their enforcement, there is every likelihood that perpetrators would be made to stand trial and pay for their crimes.
Reasons for apparent need for globally enforceable, universal anti cyber crime
¬ Changes in global, regional and domestic demographics have indeed warranted the need and urgency for universal laws to combat cyber crimes. Governments of various nations of the world, even involving the Interpol needs to be placed at the disposal of cyber crime fighters, wherever and whenever necessary to do so.
¬ Dramatic and major developments in online communications have indeed aided and abetted cyber criminals, some of whom may be masters of the cyber crime business. They regularly outwit law enforcing agencies and many global cyber crimes remain unsolved to this day due to lack of needed evidence and enforcement laws
¬ Since cyber crimes are now not bound to one country or state, encompassing, as it were, several States and nations through globalization, it has become imperative for States to act together and work in much closer manner to control menace of cyber crime and its after effects, on individuals, cohorts, agencies, institutions and governments. This could indeed be greater advantageous if there is a consistent, cohesive and solid set of Universal laws to which all signing countries need to adhere, abide and to enforce in a consistent, comparable and cohesive manner.
¬ Criminals do take advantage of weak and inconsistent laws to wreck havoc with apparent impunity. They know that current laws are insufficient to indict or even charge them. Global law enforcement with strong legal armory could indeed stop many varieties of online crimes dead on their tracks
Conclusion: Global cyber crime can only be effectively apprehended, prosecuted and eradicated if all nations of the world join together in a determined manner to try and wipe out this scourge from the face of the earth through Universal laws, that act and impact on every nation on earth which is in dire need of robust anti cyber crime fighting mechanism.
Author Bio: I am Ronnie Custer and I am intended on writing academic cases for the past several years that are assisted me to gain knowledge in writing grading assignments for all sorts of students. I have worked in different companies in writing industry.
Links for further reading:
FBI Cyber Crime: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/cyber
Computer Crime, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_crime
Cybercrime: Is It Out of Control?: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/sep/21/cybercrime-spam-phishing-viruses-malware
James Lynn on TED: Everyday Cybercrime: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_lyne_everyday_cybercrime_and_what_you_can_do_about_it
The crew over at FornesicScienceDegrees.org have listed The Writers Forensics Blog as one of their Top 100 Websites to Bookmark, which they describe as a “list of great sites to present practical, real-world information on the subject.” Many great sources here.
Thanks. I’m flattered.
A century ago it was widely believed that the image of a killer was forever imprinted in the eyes of the victim. Sort of stamped on their retinas. This has been termed Optography and was a fiction staple in the 1800s and early 1900s. Of course, this isn’t the case. Not possible. Not yet, anyway but who knows what the future will hold.
However, in some situations a photo of the victim just might retain the killer’s image and this might be useful in tracking down the bad guy.
Scott Simon needs to control his cell phone. It simply won’t behave. I mean all he did was slip it in his pocket. That’s it. Well, and apparently discuss a premeditated murder in progress with his buddy. The problem? His phone did the old 911 butt dial thing. Oops.
The Crime Fiction Writer's Blog 