Sarah Jones' weblog

My double-sided printing idea was not among the four finalist for the federal government’s SAVE Award. The public can vote for one of the four money saving ideas until midnight tonight with the winner getting to meet President Obama and tour the holiday decorations at the White House. The Washington Post gave this synopsis of each idea.

Julie Fosbender works for the U.S. Forest Service at Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. She suggested that each national forest should deposit its revenue at a nearby local bank, instead of sending the money to a central processing facility.

Huston Prescott works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Alaska and noticed that different federal housing agencies sent different inspectors to the same subsidized housing units to conduct similar inspections. Prescott wants HUD to send just one person to do the inspections for all of the agencies.

Nancy Fichtner works at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Medical Center in Grand Junction, Colo. She wants the department to permit veterans leaving VA hospitals to take any leftover medication home with them. Otherwise the hospital just throws the medicine out, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.

Christie Dickson works for the Social Security Administration in Birmingham, Ala., and wants the agency to give people the option to schedule their appointments online instead of only over the phone.

My personal favorite is the US Forrest Service idea because it also supports local banks. Read the full article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120904308.html

Posted by Sarah Jones at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Drug Trafficking:

In March 2008, Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia, a Colombian drug lord was caught relaying messages embedded in hundreds of Hello Kitty images. Abadia, who controls the Valle del Norte cartel, has earned an estimated $1.8 billion from drug trafficking along the Pacific coast of Mexico and California. He is being held by Brazilian authorities on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder but may be extradited to the US under an agreement with the Drug Enforcement Agency. Brazilian police did not have the necessary computers and technical expertise to extract the hidden data, but the DEA was able to decode the files in exchange for his prosecution in the US. The images contained audio recordings of Abadia, photographs of transit routes, and instructions on cocaine shipments.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ieuIvbrvmfofmOt8o0YfXzbysVuQ

Corporate Espionage and Intellectual Property Theft:

In June 2000, Electronic Evidence Discovery Inc., a Seattle-based forensics consulting firm, led an investigation of insider corporate espionage at an undisclosed engineering company. Most insider corporate espionage cases go unreported or are handled internally because of the damage it could cause to a company’s image and stock price. However there have been many anonymous or undisclosed examples in recent years of employees stealing intellectual property by embedding the information in another, innocuous file.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/71726/Steganography_Hidden_Data

Posted by Sarah Jones at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steganography is capable of aiding organized criminal operations, but is there any evidence that it is actually used by criminal operations? If such evidence exists, then it has serious policy implications for the US. Here are some recent instances of steganography uncovered in criminal investigations:

Terrorism:
Indian investigators believe the July 7, 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai hotels were covertly planned using emails containing steganographic files. The files contained maps, blueprints, photographs and instructions from leaders and were sent from at least 35 email accounts.

http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_mumbai-police-fail-to-crack-july-11-suspects-mail_1058716

Child Pornography:

British law enforcement task forces dedicated to catching distributors of child pornography regularly encounter and attempt to decrypt steganographic images of child abuse. A string of 2008 terrorism-related raids uncovered several instances of altered child abuse images, though Scotland Yard has not disclosed the content of the altered files. British security services now believe that the use of child pornography images and websites by individuals with ties to terrorism is a growing trend. They have established several pilot programs to cross train counter terrorism and child welfare task force officials to be aware of this trend.

Without naming specific cases, security officials referring to the anti-terror raids uncovered as few as a dozen or as many as 40,000 altered images of child abuses on suspects computers. They also said these images turn up in some of the most advanced terror plots. Officials are unsure if users have the images for their own personal gratification or if they are exploiting already established communication networks of organized criminal activity.
British officials first became aware of the nexus between child pornography and terrorism in 2006 when two separate investigations uncovered images of child abuse. Police in Italy uncovered similar images in a 2001 terrorism investigation at a mosque in Milan. An al-Qaida recruiter running the mosque was convicted of possessing several computers containing images and ideos of child pornography believed to contain embedded content.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4959002.ece

http://www.out-law.com/page-2732

Posted by Sarah Jones at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)