Cyber-criminal Left In Charge of Prison Computer Network 389
samzenpus writes "A 27-year-old man serving six years for stealing £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet was recruited to help write code needed for the installation of an internal prison TV station. He was left unguarded with unfettered access to the system and produced results that anyone but prison officials could have guessed. He installed a series of passwords on all the machines, shutting down the entire prison computer system. A prison source said, 'It's unbelievable that a criminal convicted of cyber-crime was allowed uncontrolled access to the hard drive. He set up such an elaborate array of passwords it took a specialist company to get it working.'"
Six years? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting that inmates have access to computers and TV. I'm glad we pay for that for them while normal citizens are having a hard time finding a job...
Considering most of them are in their for minor drug charges and are no more evil than you or me...
And that most of the tax money goes into the hands of the private corporations running the prisons and use the inmates for sub minimum wage labor at a profit which none goes back to the tax payers.
So simple solution... Reform the laws and decriminalize these minor offenses and revoke the contracts with the private corporations running these prisions.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Civilized countries rehabilitate prisoners, and yes, that includes schooling them on what they will find in society once they've served their sentence.
The alternative, a punishment based system like in the US, causes those coming out of prison to be unemployable, and their only recourse is crime. Which is one of the main reasons why the recidivism rate and percent of the population in prison is much higher in the US than in other western countries.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah its not like giving them opportunity works and as a result we have a lower re-offending rate than America (harsher prisons) but higher than Sweden (nicer prisons), but fuck it, I'm having a hard time finding a job so all spending should be cut even if it makes everybody less safe and effect wastes more money (1 "expensive" stay vs 10+ cheap stays).
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Brits (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats almost as dumb as putting a Halliburton CEO in charge of the entire military.
Luckily nothing that stupid would ever happen here in America.
You're right, that never happened. While Dick Cheney was at one point the CEO of Halliburton, he was in charge of the U.S. military before he worked for Halliburton. As Vice President he had no authority over the military.
Just because some screw up (Score:1, Insightful)
does it mean nobody should be ever given a chance? This guy acted pretty dumb, knowing that he be caught for sure. It's too bad someone else is now less likely to be given a chance to put their skills for good purpose after screwing up.
Re:Six years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting that inmates have access to computers and TV.
Imagine a group of people with little respect for authority, and, in many cases, a history of violence.
Now take away their TV.
Do you really think that putting down prison riots is cheaper than just letting them vegetate in front of the idiot box? Are you, a normal citizen, volunteering for that job? I'm sure there's an opening there.
Re:Stupid Brits (Score:1, Insightful)
Just because he had no "authority" didn't mean he didn't assert control. I seem to recall that it was Cheney's office that provided the falsified intelligence that was used to justify the war in Iraq. Authority is only required if you have ethics.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1, Insightful)
I got to say that you need to be modded up out of flamebait. not because you are right, but because you are not flamebait. you may be dumb IMO but not flamebait.
please remember people, there is no mod for "you don't agree with me", and not everybody who disagrees with you is a troll or flamebait.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Answer:
Sort of. It seems that there's a group of mods who've decided that anything that's subjective, or opinionated will be marked Flamebait. Any joke that they whoosh on gets marked Troll.
Solution(?):
Metamoderate. Hopefully that lowers the chances of them getting to mod again.
Re:Six years? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the poster that you're replying to was implying that the six year sentence is hardly a deterrent for the amount that the criminal was convicted for stealing. If stealing 6.5 million pounds gets you six years in the slammer, and the alternative is working 20 years for only 2.5 million pounds, then suddenly the risk of getting caught doesn't seem so bad.
(Well, I wouldn't want to even spend one minute in prison, let alone six years, but that's just me :-D )
I think their whole point was that six years is way too small of a sentence for someone who stole that much money, not that he got to keep it after he was released. Keep in mind, there are cyber-criminals that are still at large, so there are some that get away with it. They usually get caught only when they don't know their boundaries and try to go for TOO much.
Why did he do it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Brits (Score:5, Insightful)
And this felon had "no authority" over the prison computer system.
You don't need "authority", you just need access.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how many of those violent crimes were committed by drug addicts.
Re:Stupid Brits (Score:1, Insightful)
Just because he had no "authority" didn't mean he didn't assert control. I seem to recall that it was Cheney's office that provided the falsified intelligence that was used to justify the war in Iraq. Authority is only required if you have ethics.
Such an asinine statement. Who has more ethics, the asshole gassing the Kurds or the asshole that bombs the asshole gassing the Kurds (regardless of the reason)?
The Three R's (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OMG NOT THE HARD DRIVE ONE ONE 1111 (Score:5, Insightful)
...should always have been done so under supervision and with logging...
I agree with the logging side, but if they give him Admin then all the log will contain is him locating and killing the logging script (This CAN be avoided, but I doubt that they would have gone through that much trouble even if they were logging). The supervision probably would have been pointless though. More than likely, it would be a trained guard standing over him watching him do EXACTLY what he did. And, if asked what he was doing, he'd explain that he was adjusting permissions so that everything would work. If they hired somebody to supervise that could accurately determine whether he was being malicious, they could probably just ask the supervisor to do the job.
Hell, if you ask me to supervise an inmate in a chem lab while he brews up aspirin and he's actually making nitroglycerin, I'd probably stand there and ignorantly watch him make nitroglycerin.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing you went to The Bureau of Justice Stastics [usdoj.gov] site, which indeed says that in 2005, 53% were for violent crimes, 19% were property crimes, and 19% were drug crimes (it also says 8% are "public order" crimes; i.e., bullshit "crimes" like public intoxiction or prostitution).
While it's a relief that half of the prisoners aren't in there for drugs, fully one in five inmates are incarcerated for drugs.
It gives 2008 numbers for how many there are, but 20% of 2,310,984 is 462,197. Half a million Americans are imprisoned for drug crimes. And when they get out of prison, where will they get their money? Nobody wants to hire an ex-con. I would guess that for many of the violent and property offenders, it wasn't their first visit. How many started out getting busted for dope, then couldn't get work and stole to eat?
20% of prisoners, half a million people. It's a huge problem.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the 'civilized' approach of which you speak means that they blindly perform acts that some expert says will reform the criminals, then they let them out, and finally the criminals commit crime again.
That is why the vast majority of people in prison are repeat offenders: reform does not work most of the time.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Brits (Score:2, Insightful)
How about the asshole who gave the asshole gassing the Kurds the gas in the first place?
Oh right, that would be Donald Rumsfeld who completed that deal during the Reagen administration, not Richard Cheney.
I'm sorry when exactly do you think Regan took office? The Iraqi's were trying to kill all the Kurds since about 1960. Killing the Kurds and stealing their oilfields. So what if the gas was purchased and used later, the genocide attempt was going on for 20 years prior.
I just love it when the frothing-at-the-mouth liberals try to blame a single, US "official" for doing something EVEYRONE FUCKING KNOWS was the right thing to do, even if the reason was falsified.
Re:Don't they... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they hire some guy so inept he got caught TWICE?
For the same reason the US keeps buying stuff from China.
eg. it's *cheap*
Series of passwords? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the prison didn't have anyone IT saavy or they never would have relied on an inmate. As I understand it, he simply changed some admin passwords and set the bios password. When they couldn't figure out how to change things back, they refused to let the guy show them how to fix it and hire an outside consultant.
Re:Stupid Brits (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait a sec, have the goal posts moved again? It was about weapons of mass destruction, then it was about bringing democracy to masses yearning for it, then it was about protecting the Sunnis from the Shiite forces that we kind of, um, unleashed on them, and now it's payback for the Kurds?
I think the real motivation was to revive the corpse of Gilgamesh and create a new race of super-warriors, but that's just my theory.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oddly enough, when I start googling for statistics to support your statement, I find things that say that there are fewer Drug offenders in prison that people convicted of Property crimes, and fewer of both those groups combined than people convicted of Violent crimes.
In other words, drug charges, major or minor, account for about 22% of the prison population in the USA.
Oh, and 55% of the prison population are in for violent crimes, and the remainder for property crimes.
So did I, and I found very different numbers:
Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates as of Sept. 30, 2007. Of these, 15,647 were incarcerated for violent offenses, including 2,915 for homicide, 8,966 for robbery, and 3,939 for other violent crimes. In addition, 10,345 inmates were serving time for property crimes, including 504 for burglary, 7,834 for fraud, and 2,006 for other property offenses. A total of 95,446 were incarcerated for drug offenses. Also, 56,237 were incarcerated for public-order offenses, including 19,528 for immigration offenses and 24,435 for weapons offenses.
Source:
Sabol, William J., PhD, and West, Heather C., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2007 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2008), NCJ224280, p. 22, Appendix Table 12.
Just goes to show that you can always find statistics to prove/disprove any point. The smart person, however, takes each one with a grain of salt.
Re:Just because some screw up (Score:3, Insightful)
All right, how will a guy whose main skills are computer related be able to pay back victims of identity theft? Would it be, by any chance, by holding a profitable job where he works with computers? Or do you want to go back to debt prisons where people are kept, at taxpayers expense and without profitable occupation, until they pay back the debt?
Debtor's prisons were stupid. Let me just say that much.
I know, you can't pay back if you don't have a profitable job. But just because you went to jail doesn't mean you shouldn't have that debt to pay. I'm not saying that they should stay in jail until they can pay it back. I'm saying they shouldn't "get out of debt free" simply because of jail time. That's not reparation.
In reality, most people will not be able to pay back the victims in their lifetime, let alone in the time after which we think is reasonable to stop punishing someone and let them move on with their lives.
Hm. So, the poor criminal stole too much and he can't pay it back? I'm not sure if I have much sympathy for him. Maybe he should have thought of that before he stole it? Unfortunately, our current legal system doesn't really provide much incentive to think about that kind of problem if you're caught. 6 years of jail for stealing a ton of money in credit cards doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent, and certainly didn't rehabilitate this guy too well...
As for "better the society in general," I don't have a problem with that except that his debt isn't to society in general... it's to his victims, is it not? I would think they should reap any possible reparation before society does...
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
The high incarceration percentage in the US has nothing at all to do with rehabilitation vs. punishment. The high US incarceration rate is due to Federal minimum mandatory sentences for drug related crimes. If you are caught with more than 1 gram of crack you go to jail for 10 years, no exceptions, no deals and no circumstances will change that sentence. It's a minimum mandatory sentence. Take the drug non violent drug offenders out of the US prisons and the incarceration rate would be identical to European countries because they don't put their drug addicts in jail in Europe.
Real scientific studies on recidivism rates that compare punishment systems verses "rehabilitation" based systems show no statistical significance between recidivism rates. let me reiterate, No difference that can be verified. In fact comparisons that dip back into history show that even when England engaged in capital punishment for nearly every crime, when they shipped every criminal to prison colonies in the US and Australia and their current "rehabilitation" bases system that there was no statistically significant difference in crime rates. The fact is crime rate is a pretty constant thing, even if you execute every single criminal. People don't consider the consequences and you can't "rehabilitate" them. "Rehabilitation" is a bunch of pseudo psychiatric jargon to make us feel good about putting people in cages for the majority of their adult life. Prison should have one single purpose, it should be to separate criminals from those that don't commit crimes. You have to give people the opportunity to change by letting them out every now and then (based on what they did), but you aren't going change them or their criminality.
The only person that can rehabilitate a criminal is the criminal deciding he's going to stop breaking the law. The only thing that can generally decide recidivism rates is the type of crime, influenced slightly by age and whether it's a first offense. It's possible to scare first offenders straight (for general crime, this doesn't apply to sex crimes), but there is no consistent way to do so and studies show scattergun techniques using multiple approaches can reduce recidivism among young first offenders but no one technique will work consistently. Older repeat offenders simply can't be rehabilitated. Much like drug abuse, the only way they will stop committing crimes is if they want to, not through any "program" that tries to rehabilitate them. So talk about rehabilitation if it makes you feel better, but don't make it out to be a panacea as it simply doesn't work and the statistics show that. Find a program that can actually reduce recidivism that doesn't involve lobotomies and you will win the Nobel prize and make millions on the talk show and book circuit, but the simple fact is you can't rehabilitate someone that doesn't want to change and 90% (percentages vary based on crime) of criminals don't want to change.
Sounds like typical authoritarian over-reaction. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, come on. The man must have known that he would get caught, which leads me to wonder if in fact he really did anything wrong.
Anybody here who wrote a program for a prison system would consider it irresponsible to NOT set passwords. But before you are given a chance to explain the very good reasons for what you've done, the big men with truncheons who are already watching you like a hawk assume the worst and start running around like Chicken Little with the sky falling.
That's my guess.
And chickens just LOVE it when the sky falls; it gives them a sense of purpose and an excuse to play 'hero'. Heck, I know a couple of cops, and they are good people, but their world view is very slanted due to regular exposure to the criminal element. Without a healthy means of grounding to the real world, their sense of reality can become wildly inaccurate. Add to that some over-enlarged ego, lots of fear, pack-mentality and a bit of down-home stupid, and you're looking at a system where innocence is not assumed and some really terrible things can -and do- happen.
I'm not saying the guy was mister pure-heart, but I bet the whole story isn't being represented here. --What with the hysteria that both police and the media typically spin themselves into over anything to do with computer 'hackers', I think this is entirely likely.
But it appears that many posters here aren't capable of remembering the patterns they see in the news wrt this kind of story. Hackers!
-FL
Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, basically you're saying that the other 1.8 million people in prison in the USA don't count?
Hint: the federal prison population consists of people violating federal laws. Murder, arson, assault, rape, things like that? State laws cover them, unless committed on Federal land or against officers of the Federal government.
Ditto for most property crimes.
Drug crimes, on the other hand, include a lot of smuggling into the country. Which is federal territory.
Hence a large number of drug offenders in Federal Prison, but a small number in State prisons. Note, by the by, that more than half of all drug offenders in the nation are in Federal Prison, while only about 3% of the violent criminals are so incarcerated.
Note also that that "higher incarceration rate than any other nation" includes State prisons as well as Federal ones (based on the fact that the numbers that go with the claim are in the millions, rather than less than 200,000).
Re:6yrs.. turned into LIFE.. what a moron (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe he decided that with the depression taking it's toll on the outside world and all that getting "LIFE" in prison was the best job stability he could hope for.
Re:Hmmm. (Score:1, Insightful)
I live down the street from a half-way house. Most are a bunch of skinny looking dudes. The larger ones are like that from a life of manual labor.
Re:OTOH... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup that was my first reaction too. They let you on a box to install a prison-wide TV system so what do you do?
A. Install the system, get the props from your fellow inmates who know you are responsible for keeping their new toy running; get props from the authorities, increasing your chances of an early release; build enough trust that maybe in the future you'll be allowed somewhere near a box to do other fun stuff,
OR,
B. SNAFU the system, volunteer as the authorities' punching bag; blow your chances of an early release; and ensure you will not be allowed anywhere near anything more advanced than a transistor radio for the next 5 years?
Which just goes to show that intelligence doesn't immunise you against stupidity.