Larry, The IT Guy (No... make that, Spy)

Security Directors, CEOs, Chief Legal Counsels:
Immediately after you read this, make sure you have a clear, concise written policy in place detailing allowable IT behavior.

One in three IT administrators say they or one of their colleagues have used top-level admin passwords to pry into confidential or sensitive information at their workplace, according to a survey by a password-management vendor.

Nearly half also confessed that they have poked around systems for information not relevant to their jobs.

"We asked these questions last year, too," said Adam Bosnian, vice president of product strategy and sales for Cyber-Ark, a Newton, Mass.-based maker of password file security management software. "And we got similar results. So on one hand, the results weren't surprising. What was surprising initially -- and this time around, too -- is that people admit to it." (more)

Remind Employees - "Don't sing!"

One in five U.S. workers regularly attends after-work drinks with co-workers, where the most common mishaps range from bad-mouthing another worker to kissing a colleague and drinking too much, according to a study... (survey conducted for CareerBuilder.com)

As to what happens when the after-work drinks flow... Five percent said they had shared a secret about the company, and 4 percent confessed to singing karaoke.

Overall, 21 percent of workers attend happy hours with co-workers and, of those, nearly a quarter go at least once a month. (more)

Smart Spy Cameras

UK - Intelligent CCTV cameras are being developed in Britain that not only see trouble but are able to hear it, scientists said.

The technology allows the sounds of breaking glass, someone shouting, or the noise of a crowd gathering to be 'learned' by artificial intelligence software in the cameras.

The technology could slash the speed with which crimes are caught on camera and responded to by police but will again raise a debate about the extent of "surveillance Britain" and the use of such technology.

The three-year project by the University of Portsmouth aims to adapt artificial intelligence software already being developed to identify visual patterns. (more)

Amazing Spy Gear - PENCAM-15C

Better yet...
A. Can you guess how little it costs?
B. Can you guess the recording time?
C. Can you guess her phone number?




Need three or more? Call the source.
Need some counterespionage help?
Call someone who knows this stuff exists, me.

Time to A-ppeal!!!

We work in The Big Apple.
We see a lot of weird things;
everything from terrestrial Victorian borescopes to the Naked Cowboy.

Naked Cowboy drives to work each day between 11 and noon, in costume, with his female companion. 'Naked' parks in the same 43rd Street garage we use, jumps out and gets right to work. Doesn't matter whether it is 95 degrees and sunny, or 20 degree with snow. He is there. He makes millions smile. Want a photo with him; just stuff a buck in his boot and click away.

Whattaguy! Hard working. A real Robert Lampf 'dare to be different' original.

Here is the outrage...
"A judge said a Times Square entertainer who wears just enough to justify the name the "Naked Cowboy" can continue a lawsuit he brought against a blue M&M.

Federal Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan on Monday stripped Robert Burck of some of his claims that a blue M&M wearing a white cowboy hat, cowboy boots and underpants violates his trademarks.

But the judge left intact one strand of that lawsuit. Mr. Chin said Mr. Burck might be able to prove that Mars Inc., which makes M&Ms, unfairly gave the impression that he had endorsed its advertising campaign.

For its part, Mars says the ad campaign was a parody and is protected by the First Amendment." (source)

I wonder how M&M would take it if Naked Cowboy took Big Blue, x'ed out his eyes, cracked his shell, and propped him up in a 42nd St. doorway with an empty whiskey bottle??? Parody? Art, perhaps?

Naked Cowboy will survive – and ride off into the sunset in a big black Cadillac SUV.
Go Naked.

Spying Spouses

Family law can sometimes involve “good people, behaving badly.”

That’s according to Laura W. Morgan, of Family Law Consulting in Charlottesville, Va., who offers the tale of a hypothetical client named Mary, who thinks her husband, John, is cheating on her and using marital funds to pay for his trysts. Among other tactics, Mary purchased surveillance software, popularly known as “spyware,” and installed it on a shared computer, so she could read John’s password-protected e-mails and see the Web sites he visits. She additionally took the computer to a forensic computer specialist, who made a copy of the hard drive and then found scads of evidence that could be damaging to John in a divorce.

Mary is what Morgan calls a “self-help” spouse, because she has forgone formal electronic discovery — and it was easy and fairly inexpensive for her to do that. The problem is she may have broken a few laws in the process. (more)

Man Used Cell Phone to Bug Ex-girlfriend

A Swedish man has been given a suspended sentence for converting a cell phone to a bugging device to confirm his suspicions about his ex-girlfriend. A court in Hasselholm in southern Sweden also imposed a fine.

The man hid the phone behind the headboard of his girlfriend's bed, hooking up the charger to a bedside lamp. He set the phone up so, when he called it, the phone allowed him to hear what was being said in her room -- and he learned his ex- had indeed met someone else.

The court found the man's violation of his former girlfriend's privacy was so serious that a fine alone was not enough. (more)

Open Season on Bugging Cellphones

The Geek Chorus welcomes Alan Reiter, President of Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing as he echos our warnings, in his well-written piece 'Open Season on Bugging Cellphones'...

"Silently, but with increasing frequency, government agencies and private individuals around the world are bugging cellular phones. Some of those phones are surreptitiously transmitting copies of their SMS, emails, call histories, and locations to Websites where the data may be viewed by those who have installed the clandestine software.

Most cellular subscribers don't have to worry about this happening to them, at least not yet. But anyone -- suspected criminals, spies, corporate executives, spouses, and even ex-lovers -- could be targeted. Thanks to software you can purchase over the Web, you don't have to be a secret agent to listen to cellular conversations or retrieve data transmissions.

Recently, a Swedish man was found guilty of hiding a cellular phone behind the headboard of his ex-girlfriend’s bed and remotely turning on the phone to listen to conversations..." (more)

Spy News of the Week

Sweden - "Earlier this week the Swedish stasi-government decided -- against the peoples wishes -- to wiretap all internet and telephone traffic in order to protect Sweden against threats. As you all know, being a neutral country makes Sweden a target for all the terrorists of the world, apparently," blogs one of The Pirate Bay's admins, Peter Sunde. "Many people have asked me what we're planning to do -- and the answer is 'A lot!'. This week we're going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We're also going to help out making a website about easy encryption -- both for your hard drives and your net traffic." (more)

Germany - German incumbent Deutsche Telekom is going to get yet another scolding. German public television channel ZDF reported the former operator turned self-spying agency wire tapped a few customers. Apparently 120 calls were illegally tapped by the company, without any court order or involvement of the police. (more)

UK - Every council in England will today be instructed to stop using tough laws to spy on people over "trivial matters" such as dog-fouling and litter offences. (more)

New Zealand - A 21-year-old peeping tom has been caught spying on his female neighbour in Dunedin. The Otago University student was nabbed peering through a flat window just before 9pm yesterday. (more)

India - This year the Delhi University saw many of the "spy students" hired by private detective agencies being roped in by parents to keep an eye on their wards. However... a growing number of students are visiting detective agencies and are offering handsome amounts to them to know whether their parents have hired any "spy students", mainly girls, to keep a watch on their activities. (more)

United States - Xiaodong Sheldon Meng, 44, who was raised in China and holds Canadian citizenship, was sentenced on the rare charge of committing economic espionage against the U.S. It's the most serious crime under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 and involves stealing trade secrets to benefit a foreign government. (more)

South Africa - The bugging devices of the former dispensation, which were used in foreign embassies in South Africa and had been planted by an espionage front company, are still being used. (more)

Switzerland - A left-wing campaign group asked Swiss authorities on Friday to investigate Swiss food and drinks giant Nestle SA for allegedly hiring a spy to infiltrate the group. A Swiss chapter of anti-globalization group Attac filed the legal complaint in Vaud canton (state), after learning that an employee of Securitas AG security company took part in its private meetings between late 2003 and June 2004... (more)

United States - US information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 per cent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role. (more)

Bulgaria - A man applied for a job as an industrial spy. Together with several other applicants, he was given a sealed envelope and told to take it to the fourth floor. As soon as the man was alone, he stepped into an empty hallway and opened the envelope. Inside, a message read: "You're our kind of person. Report to the fifth floor Personnel Office." (source)

SpyCam Story #451 - Cheap Thrill

A 52-year-old Long Island man has been arrested on charges of videotaping women's private body parts as they shopped at a dollar store. Nassau County police say the man followed unsuspecting women around the store in Baldwin and placed a camcorder under their clothing. (more)
Perhaps he was also shopping for DSPM parts?

Corporate Espionage Detailed in Documents

It is rare to see hard evidence of corporate espionage.

Well-executed corporate espionage goes undetected.

This is unusual...

In the 1990s, a Maryland-based private detective agency composed of former CIA agents and law enforcement officers spied...

The agency, Beckett Brown International, had an operative at meetings of a group in Rockville that accused a nursing home of substandard care. In Louisiana, it kept tabs on environmental activists after a chemical spill. In Washington, it spied on food safety activists who had found taco shells made with genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption.

BBI, which was founded in 1995, disbanded in 2000, and the activists might never have learned they were spied on. But a disgruntled BBI investor began digging through company records two years ago and has been contacting the former targets. He also gave The Washington Post access to the records, which provide an unusually detailed look into the secretive world of corporate spying.

Not all of BBI's work targeted activists: Lysol wanted details of a New Jersey high school student's science fair project about cleaning products. Mary Kay executives sought a secret "psychological assessment" of a fellow executive. A consultant working for Nestlé wanted information about rivals Mars and Whetstone Candy...

An undercover operative not identified in the documents was named to the governing board of CLEAN. "I will be in the 'inner circle' and included in all the planning meetings," he wrote in an e-mail.

The operative reported on meetings held at the law office after business hours and on private conversations about lawsuits, one of which took place in a parking lot because of concern that meeting rooms were bugged. (more)

Now you know why eavesdropping and espionage detection is part of every good corporate security program.

Electronic Surveillance Law Updates

U.S. - The House yesterday easily approved a compromise bill setting new electronic surveillance rules that effectively shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits arising from the government's terrorism-era warrantless eavesdropping on phone and computer lines in this country.

The bill, which was passed on a 293-129 vote, does more than just protect the telecoms. The update to the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is an attempt to balance privacy rights with the government's responsibility to protect the country against attack, taking into account changes in telecommunications technologies.

The House's passage of the FISA Amendment bill marks the beginning of the end to a months long standoff between Democrats and Republicans about the rules for government wiretapping inside the United States. The Senate was expected to pass the bill with a large margin, perhaps as soon as next week, before Congress takes a break during the week of the Fourth of July. (more)

Sweden - Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic. The country's intelligence bureau will be able to scan international calls, faxes and e-mails. ...The bill will become law in January. (more)

How Legal Wiretapping Works in the U.S.

The days of sitting in a basement, monitoring a line, using your Audiotechnics pocket 'buttset' with alligator clips is over. G-people now sit at computers in their air-conditioned offices. The process was simply explained, by arlene, in this post...

"CALEA requires that communications providers allow law enforcement officials to be able to listen in on phone conversations and get information about those phone calls, but only when the law enforcement agency has gotten approval for the tap.

The law enforcement agency goes before a judge and presents reasons a wiretap is needed. If the judge approves, a legal document or order is delivered to the communications provider.

A specially authorized person at the communications provider logs in to a system specifically set up for CALEA-approved wiretaps. A number of systems are sold by various manufacturers, but all of them tap into the routers and switches that make up telecommunications networks.
All calls on the communications network are routed digitally over switches and routers. The system used for taps connects to a central point in the network, over which all communications travel.

The tapping system captures two primary pieces of information about the call—the actual voice transmission itself (often referred to as call content information [CCC]) and data associated with each call, such as the phone numbers at both ends of the call (often referred to as call associated data [CDC]).

The CCC and the CDC information are sent over special secure routers to the law enforcement agency.

The Federal Communications Commission has ruled that PC-to-PC calls, when a call is made directly from one computer to another over the Internet using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software such as Skype, is subject to CALEA. But as of this writing, no technical way has been devised to tap in to those calls." (source)

'Get Smart' Reviews, Smart

"GET SMART" is a film mistaken about its own identity. As a reworking of one of the great 1960s TV comedies, you'd think being funny would be its main goal. But you would be wrong. Very, very wrong. Like its protagonist, in-over-his-head secret agent Maxwell Smart, "Get Smart" yearns to be something it's not. Unaccountably eager to walk in the footsteps of James Bond, "Get Smart" neglects the laughs and amps up the action, resulting in a not very funny comedy joined at the hip to a not very exciting spy movie. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. (more)
However, in the back of the DVD bin...
Peter Segal’s top five 'Get Smart' episodes
Would you believe we asked Peter Segal, the director of the spy comedy "Get Smart," starring Steve Carell as Agent 86 Maxwell Smart and Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, to name his top 50 episodes of the classic TV series on which the film is based?
Would you believe we asked him his top 25?
How about his top 10?
All right, we settled for his top five. (more)
Get Smart - The Complete Original TV Series

'Bug'ged Car Phone? With Voice Male?

The Phone Car is a modified by a 1975 Volkswagen Beetle. Created by Howard Davis as a way to promote his telephone biz, Datel Communications. Check out the video of this phone car on the road. The horn, of course, rings. (more)
More Art Cars...