The Lego Line-up

In 2021, in the name of criminal justice reform, California enacted a new law to prohibit police departments from posting “mug shot” photos on social media platforms of suspects apprehended for non-violent crimes. In 2023, California expanded the law by requiring police departments to remove any mug shots of suspects from social media accounts after 14 days. Both requirements took effect this year.

The police department in Murrieta, California–located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego–has taken a novel approach to compliance with the new law. It’s posting “mug shot” photos of suspects, but obscuring their actual heads with “Lego” heads. Examples of the results–which are curious, to say the least–are shown above.

Why post Lego head photos of suspects apprehended for non-violent crimes? As quoted in the Los Angeles Times article linked above, a Murrieta police department spokesman explained: “The Murrieta Police Department prides itself in its transparency with the community, but also honors everyone’s rights & protections as afforded by law; even suspects. In order to share what is happening in Murrieta, we chose to cover the faces of suspects to protect their identity while still aligning with the new law.”

The Times article quotes a professor of sociology and criminology at Cal Poly Pomona, who argues that publishing Lego head mug shots really doesn’t serve the need for transparency, and seems to be an effort to mock and dehumanize arrested suspects and damage their reputations. That concern seems overblown to me, however. Since the faces are totally obscured, the general public won’t be able to identify the suspects, and therefore their reputations aren’t really at risk. And publishing photos of captured suspects, even with Lego heads, does serve a transparency purpose–it shows the Murrieta residents, and would-be non-violent criminals, that the Murrieta police department is doing its job. A picture of two captured suspects, handcuffed and deposited in the back of a patrol car, has an impact that the dry textual reporting of an apprehension just can’t match.

I understand the impetus of the California law, because it helps to fully implement the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty, but it seems to me that the Murrieta police department has found a clever way to comply with the law yet still provide meaningful information about public safety issues to residents. And if the creative use of Lego heads makes more people pay attention to the social media postings of the Murrieta police about what they’re doing to deal with crime in their community, is that really a bad thing?

Giving In To Car Thieves

Toronto, Canada, like many large cities, has been confronted by a rash of car thefts. A Toronto police officer recently offered a novel and controversial bit of advice about how to deal with the issue: leave your car keys in a pouch near the front door of your home, so they can be quickly found by the criminals looking to steal your car.

The police officer, who was speaking at a local safety meeting last month, said that leaving the car keys in a convenient place to be found by thieves would help avoid potentially violent confrontations with criminals. The officer explained: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at the front door because they are breaking into your home to steal your car; they don’t want anything else.” The officer added that many of the car thieves being arrested are carrying “real guns,” and “not toy guns.”

The officer no doubt was well meaning and concerned for the safety of local residents. Car theft in the Toronto area increased 25 percent in 2023 versus 2022, and home break-ins associated with auto theft increased by an astonishing 400 percent. Obviously, that’s a problem. But advising residents to make it easier for thieves to steal a car doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the police. Instead, it seems like throwing in the towel and giving in to the bad guys. And you wonder: is that kind of advice just going to embolden the criminals, and would-be criminals, and encourage even more house break-ins and car thefts?

Not surprisingly, Toronto area residents didn’t exactly welcome the police officer’s advice–and to be fair to the Toronto police force, they’ve offered other advice on how to avoid car thefts, too. But the underlying premise of the police officer’s advice seems totally wrong. The onus shouldn’t be on residents to make it easier for criminals to steal, in hopes of avoiding the commission of more serious crimes, it should be on safety forces to thwart the car thefts and apprehend the car thieves in the first place. That logically means more police officers patrolling the streets and more police officers dedicated to apprehending the criminals. There’s work to be done in that regard: so far in 2024, almost 1,600 vehicles have been stolen in the Toronto area, and only 41 of the cases have been solved.

It would be interesting to see statistics on how many of the members of the Toronto police force are actually out patrolling the streets or trying to track down thieves, and how many have desk jobs or administrative duties that don’t really involve the basic mission of any police force: to protect the citizenry, prevent crime, and get bad guys off the streets. The Toronto police department may want to revisit its priorities.

An Appeal To Headline Writers

You may have seen this regrettable headline recently: “Ohio women put dead man in car’s passenger seat, try to withdraw money at bank drive-thru, police say.”

The accompanying article is about an 80-year-old man who owned a house in Ashtabula and allowed two women to live there. When the old-timer unfortunately died at home, according to one of the women who described what happened in a phone call from jail that was recorded by authorities, the women put him in the passenger seat of their car where he could be seen and then went through the drive-thru line at his bank where they withdrew $900 from his bank account. The women then drove to the hospital where they dropped off his body, allegedly without identifying the dead man or themselves. They’ve since been identified, arrested, and charged with theft and gross abuse of a corpse.

I want to make this appeal to headline writers everywhere: when one of these weird stories about appalling misconduct arises, can we please stop identifying the actor’s state of residence in the headline? It’s not as if, in this case, living in Ohio had anything to do with the women’s decision to take advantage of a dead man. Having lived in Ohio for most of my life, I can assure you that the Buckeye State does not condone or encourage that kind of activity. And in that time I’ve gotten to know many “Ohio women,” and I feel confident that none of them would have done what the two women did in this case. Headlines like the one quoted above improperly smear the reputation of both Ohio and the women who live here.

We’ve all seen countless “Florida man” news stories about random guys in Florida doing something strange. I’d hate to see “Ohio women” stories become a similar staple of the clickbait news websites. Can’t we just agree to leave the states where people happen to misbehave out of it?

Reconsidering “Sanctuary City” Status

Should American cities be “sanctuary cities”–enclaves that welcome undocumented immigrants and pledge not to cooperate with the federal agents who are attempting to enforce national immigration laws? Two of our country’s largest cities, New York City and Chicago, are wrestling with that issue, which has been brought to a head by the border crisis and the movement of thousands of migrants to their cities.

Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for changes to the laws that make the Big Apple a sanctuary city. His immediate focus is on migrants who commit serious crimes; he thinks they should be deported and that the City authorities should be able to communicate with federal ICE agents to accomplish that.

Existing NYC law prohibits cooperation with federal agents if a foreign national has been charged by a crime but not convicted. More than 150,000 migrants have come to New York City in recent months, causing the city to incur an estimated $10 billion to care for them and also producing what the New York Post has called a “migrant crime wave.” New York’s City Council rejected Mayor Adams’ call for change in the “sanctuary city” laws, however, and now the Mayor is exploring whether he can accomplish the change through some kind of legal action instead.

In Chicago, City Council initially approved, and then reconsidered and rejected, a public referendum that would have allowed voters to address whether Chicago should remain a sanctuary city. More than 25,000 migrants have come to Chicago recently, and the city is struggling with housing the new arrivals. Supporters of the referendum initiative had hoped to allow the people of Chicago to have a voice on whether to continue the policy.

Many of the American cities that are declared “sanctuary cities” adopted the policies years ago, but the policies have been cast in a new light recently, with migrants who have crossed the southern border being shipped en masse to many northern cities. It will be interesting to see whether the cities will retain their commitment to “sanctuary city” laws as the cost of feeding and housing the wave of migrants, and the need to address the criminal activity of some of those migrants, put that commitment to the test.

Vehicular Insecurity

You go to a concert at a public facility, you park your car in the facility’s parking lot . . . and then when you come out after the concert, your car is gone. That’s the sad story told by one Oakland, California resident, whose car was stolen as she attended an Alicia Keys concert at the Oakland Coliseum. When she walked out with her daughter after the concert, her Kia Forte was gone. 

She’s not alone. Oakland has experienced a remarkable surge in auto thefts. Last year, Oakland set a new record, with police reporting 13,999 stolen cars between January 1 and December 10. That’s a 46 percent increase over the same period in 2022 for Oakland, which had never before experienced more than 10,000 auto thefts in a year. Those numbers mean that Oakland experiences, on average, about 40 car thefts a day. Oakland police say that more car thefts were reported last year than car break-ins–but they think that is simply because so many break-ins occur that residents don’t even report them anymore. It’s dispiriting to think that crime in a major American city has become so commonplace that residents have been conditioned to just accept it as part of life.

Police say the car thieves particularly like Kia and Hyundai vehicles. And the spike in auto theft has a multiplying effect, because the thieves often use stolen vehicles in committing other crimes, including burglaries and robberies. In Oakland, reported burglaries were up 25 percent and reported robberies were up 36 percent from 2022 to 2023. 

The woman whose car was stolen at the concert says Oakland is now like “a lawless city.” With statistics like these, it’s hard to disagree with that assessment, or to imagine what it would be like to live in Oakland. You have to think that people who care about their personal and the security of their property and can afford to leave are doing so–which just means that the poor people left behind will be victimized more often. It’s a depressing example of how the failure to address spiraling crime can cut the heart out of a city.  

A New Method For Manipulation

People have been trying to manipulate financial markets and make a quick buck ever since financial markets were first created. The concept is so ingrained in our economic culture that it became part of the plot of a funny movie, Trading Places. But last week we saw a new approach to market manipulation, updated to the internet age.

On January 9, a tweet appeared on the X (formerly Twitter) account for the Securities and Exchange Commission that stated: ”Today the SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.” The financial markets quickly reacted to the announcement about the SEC’s approval of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, resulting in millions of dollars of activity. There was only one problem: the tweet wasn’t true. Some malicious actor gained access to the SEC’s X account, published misleading information, and presumably made some money as a result. 

It isn’t clear what happened here; people initially assumed that the SEC account had been hacked, but the SEC’s chairman has said: ”While SEC staff is still assessing the scope of the incident, there is currently no evidence that the unauthorized party gained access to SEC systems, data, devices, or other social media accounts.” That’s not exactly reassuring, because if a hacker didn’t send the phony message, some “authorized” person must have. And after the incident occurred, the X platform stated that the SEC had for some reason decided not to use two-factor authentication on its account, which would have required any user to verify their identity through two inputs and might have prevented the fake tweet.

Congress is looking into what happened here–as it certainly should. Financial markets are delicate and reactive, and too many people have too much money at stake to take any manipulation attempt lightly. If you are going to make important announcements via tweet, then obviously basic security techniques, like two-factor authentication, should be used. 

But lawmakers and the SEC might also consider a more basis issue–how should important decisions that might affect the markets be announced? Is a tweet, with the attendant risks of misuse by “authorized” or “unauthorized” persons, really the best way to disseminate a key decision? Would it make sense, from a security standpoint, to go back to the days when such announcements were made by real, known authorized people at a briefing at a governmental location that has been scheduled in advance for that specific purpose? That might be slower and more old-fashioned, but it is a lot harder to fake.

Modern Pirates

When we think of pirates, we tend of think of Blackbeard and the yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum buccaneers who terrorized commercial ships in the Caribbean during the 1700s. But the reality is that piracy has continued into the modern era, thriving in lawless areas where the lack of authority and control makes it worthwhile..

One of those areas is the Gulf of Aden, the body of water located between the horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Only two days ago a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Mason, responded to a distress call from a tanker in the Gulf of Aden that had been boarded by pirates. As the Mason and other ships in a counter-piracy task force demanded release of the tanker, the M/V Central Park, and then boarded it, the five pirates attempted to flee to Yemen in their boat. The Mason pursued, the pirates surrendered, and they are now in custody. At the end of the engagement, two ballistic missiles were fired from Yemen at the Mason and the Central Park, but fell into the water about ten miles from the ships, without causing any injury or damage.

The Pentagon believes the pirates come from Somalia. The Gulf of Aden area had been the site of significant activities by Somali pirates for many years, although the frequency of attacks diminished several years ago. It isn’t clear whether the attack on the Central Park, which apparently is linked to Israeli businessman, is associated with the current unrest in the Middle East, but it does appear to be a planned activity: the Central Park was threatened on its way into the Red Sea and then attacked by pirates on its way out. The fact that two missiles were fired further supports the conclusion that this effort was coordinated.

The U.S. military’s very dry and clinical description of this encounter with modern pirates notes that “[m]aritime domain security is essential to regional stability,” and the U.S. Navy “will continue to work with allies and partners to ensure the safety and security of international shipping lanes.” Given the amount of oil, food, and other materials that move by ship these days, we should all be grateful for that vigilance–particularly ships that need to move through the Gulf of Aden.

The Fire On The 10

If you’ve ever driven in Los Angeles, you know it is truly a town of freeways. Now one of the principal highways, Interstate 10, will be closed indefinitely due to a massive fire that authorities say was caused by arson.

The portion of the highway–known locally as the Santa Monica Freeway or “the 10”–that was damaged was elevated. The fire, which California Governor Gavin Newsom said was set intentionally, apparently began at one storage yard next to the freeway and then spread under the elevated section of the freeway to ignite another facility on the other side. The storage yards contained wooden pallets, containers, vehicles and other items that burned fiercely.

The heat from the blaze was so intense it damaged about 100 concrete pillars that hold up that section of the highway. On some of the pillars, parts of the concrete exterior have fallen off, exposing the metal interior of the columns. Now transportation officials and engineers face the task of determining whether the damage affected the structural integrity of the pillars, what repairs need to be done, and when the highway can be reopened.

The portion of I-10 that is closed is five lanes wide in each direction, and carries about 300,000 vehicles every day. Now all of those commuters will have to find an alternative way to work on roadways that were already clogged and at full capacity during rush hours. The impact of the highway closure is expected to be so significant that Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County–which tells you something about the importance of car culture in southern California.

It will be interesting to follow the investigation of the fire, to see if authorities catch the arsonist and determine why the blaze was set in the first place–and whether the arsonist was focused only on a storage yard, or hoped to damage the highway, too. But in the meantime, state and local officials might want to take a look at other parts of the California highway system, and give some thought to whether other important stretches of roadway are vulnerable to what happened to “the 10.” If the operation of a particular freeway is so important that its closure results in a state of emergency, you might not want to have storage yards or other facilities loaded with flammable materials operating right next door.

“Portland Loos” Come To Columbus

Downtown residential housing isn’t the only construction that is underway in Columbus. The city also is building three public restrooms in the downtown area. This week I walked past one of them, shown above, which is located at the corner of Broad and Third Streets, catty-corner from the Statehouse grounds.

Called “Portland loos”–a name the city of Portland probably doesn’t much care for–the bathrooms are standalone, single-user, gender-neutral, stainless steel units. Earlier this year WOSU reported that the three restrooms are projected to cost more than $2 million, all of which will be paid for by federal funds. The money is coming from COVID relief packages passed by Congress, with some funding coming from the CARES Act and other funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. (How public restrooms relate to COVID relief is anybody’s guess, but I digress.) The Portland loo project has been beset by substantial cost overruns, with the three bathrooms expected to ultimately cost twice as much as was originally forecast to build five of the restrooms.

Public opinion on the three new downtown bathrooms seems to be divided. Some argue that Columbus needs easily identifiable public facilities that can be used by visitors and homeless people; others note that the stainless steel facilities are an improvement over the plastic porta-johns found at different locations in the core city. A Capital Crossroads spokesperson quoted by WOSU in the story linked above argues that, once the “Portland loos” are operational, people will see their value and there will be demand for other public bathrooms elsewhere in Columbus.

But neighboring property owners are skeptical. They are concerned that the facilities will become magnets for homeless people and criminal activity, like drug use and prostitution, as well as the targets of vandalism–all of which apparently has happened in some other cities that have installed such facilities. Opponents of the bathrooms also fear that the toilets won’t be regularly cleaned, and that the bathrooms could become a smelly, unsightly mess.

In any case, the bathrooms are here, and it won’t be long until we know what they bring to downtown Columbus. And if they don’t quite work out as planned, who knows–we may spend a few million more to remove them.

Car Alarms In The City

Earlier this week I was working in my office when a car alarm on some vehicle parked on Gay Street went off. I immediately looked out my window to see if a would-be thief, caught in the act by the alarm, was sprinting away from the scene.

Alas, no apparent thief was fleeing the area. Nor did the alarm cause police officers to rush to the scene. Instead, it was clear that someone–including, perhaps, the car’s owner–had inadvertently tripped the alarm, and everyone in the vicinity got to be treated to the loud, alternating beeping horn sounds that make car alarms one of the most supremely annoying sounds you routinely hear in a city. The racket went on for about five minutes, then someone happily figured out how to turn it off.

I found myself wondering if there are any data points about how often car alarms have actually deterred car theft, and what percentage of car alarms involve either a malfunction or some other unintentional triggering of the device. Regrettably, these kinds of useful statistics don’t seem to exist, although evidently there was a study back in the ’90s that showed that car alarms don’t deter professional thieves, who know how to quickly disable them or just ignore them. But a Google search for “do car alarms deter theft” yields some suggested alternative search queries that indicate that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the sound of car alarms, like “has a car alarm ever prevented a theft?” (and I’m guessing that whoever created that search would have italicized and bolded “ever” if Google permitted it) and “what is the point of a car alarm?” For that matter, do any car sales people talk about a car alarm as a useful feature in a car as part of the sale pitch?

Perhaps, back in the past, someone thought car alarms were a good theft prevention idea, but years of blaring false positives have refuted that notion. Yet, car alarms still seem to be a standard feature on new cars, like the human body retaining now-useless tonsils. I’d say it’s time for car manufacturers to give us city-dwellers a break, ditch the irritating alarms, and find some other, more effective protection against thievery.

The Trump Weight Bet

It’s pretty much impossible to get away from Donald Trump these days, no matter how much you might really try to do so. What with various indictments, raids, investigations, lawsuits, and the former President’s evident narcissistic desire to be the center of attention at all times, the news websites these days seem to be all Trump, all the time. Some people apparently can’t get enough of this guy.

Recent evidence of this is that some bookmakers are taking bets on various aspects of Mr. Trump’s arraignment in Georgia, thereby combining two of America’s obsessions–gambling and Trump. You can bet on whether Trump will smile or scowl in his mugshot (or wear a MAGA hat), as well as the color of his tie, or whether he will be wearing a tie at all. And, since the booking process in Georgia apparently involves stepping on the scales, you also can bet on the former President’s weight.

The Trump weight over/under currently stands at 273.5 pounds–a number that has increased because 77 percent of bettors have chosen the “over,” causing the bookies to raise the target number by eight pounds so far. (As gamblers know, the betting lines shift as bets come in, to protect the bookies from losing their shirts.) That weight is well above what the former President has disclosed as his weight in the past, when Mr. Trump, who is 6′ 2″, has reported that he weighs about 240 pounds.

It’s weird to think that people are willing to bet about this kind of stuff. Wagering on a person’s weight is pretty embarrassing–if that person is capable of embarrassment, that is. But if you care about how much Donald Trump actually weighs, we’ll find that out this week, as he apparently won’t have the option of handing authorities one of those “please don’t weigh me” cards. Some bettors will be happy, some will be disappointed, and then, regrettably, we’ll no doubt move on to focus on a new Trump-related fixation.

“The Great Grift”

“Grifting” is defined as the act of obtaining money or property illicitly, as through some kind of a confidence game or fraudulent scheme. “Grifters” are typically thought of as small-time swindlers, like the Robert Redford character at the beginning of the film The Sting.

So when the Associate Press called its story about the theft that occurred in connection with federal programs designed to provide COVID-19 aid funds “the great grift,” there’s a bit of a disconnect–because the AP reports that the total amount that apparently was swindled from two programs administered by the Small Business Administration, and thereby from U.S. taxpayers, amounts to more than $200 billion. Even by the colossal spending standards of the modern federal government, that’s a lot of money.

According to the inspector general for the SBA, the money came from two COVID-19 programs: the Paycheck Protection program and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. The inspector general’s investigation concluded that at least 17 percent of all of the funds of these two programs were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors. The SBA itself contests these figures and contends that the inspector general’s report overestimates the actual amount of the fraud, but the Associated Press has independently reported that fraudsters stole about $280 billion from these two SBA programs and a third program intended to help workers who suddenly became unemployed due to the COVID shutdowns. The AP concludes that another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.

The disagreement over the amount of fraud comes because the SBA points out that the U.S. government doesn’t have a generally accepted system for assessing the impact of fraud on federal spending programs. The SBA inspector general says his report “utilizes investigative casework, prior (inspector general) reporting, and cutting-edge data analysis to identify multiple fraud schemes used to potentially steal over $200 billion from American taxpayers and exploit programs meant to help those in need.”

It’s amazing to think that, in these days of enormous federal budgets, there is no accepted way of assessing how much federal money is procured by fraudsters–and it’s also galling to think that nearly one in five dollars spent by two emergency programs designed to help people and businesses hurt by the COVID pandemic went to swindlers. Congress loves to pass sweeping spending bills and say that its job is done, but the SBA inspector general’s report shows that the devil is in the details. If our legislators were really serious about getting spending under control, they need to do the heavy lifting, and develop mechanisms designed to ensure that federal money actually goes to the intended recipients, not grifters.

When Hotels Hit The Road

For a period of time I had to travel regularly to San Francisco for work. On most of those trips, I stayed in a hotel in the Embarcadero area of town, close to my ultimate work destination, and would walk around town when the work day was over. I ate great food, watched seals frolic on rocks, enjoyed looking at the Golden Gate bridge and the views of the bay and Alcatraz, and never had a problem. San Francisco, in my view, was one of the rare cities in America that had a unique feel and vibe, all its own.

Obviously, something has changed since my last visit, which probably was more than a decade ago.

The latest evidence of that is the decision by a huge hotel real estate trust, Park Hotels & Resorts, to abandon its interest in two enormous San Francisco hotels: the Hilton San Francisco, which has a staggering 1,921 rooms, and the Parc 55 San Francisco, which offers a more modest (but still enormous) 1,024 rooms. Park Hotels & Resorts decided to stop payments on a $725 million loan backed by the two properties and is simply walking away from them.

In announcing its decision, Park Hotels & Resorts cited “record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand and will likely significantly reduce compression in the city for the foreseeable future.” For these reasons, Park’s CEO said “we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges.”

San Francisco has been strongly affected by the decline in business travel and the drop in downtown workers that occurred during the COVID-19 shutdown period and that haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, but as Park’s statement suggests, there are other factors at play as well. Several retailers have shuttered San Francisco locations due to a surge in shoplifting, and what Park referred to as “street conditions” relates to an increase in the city’s homeless population and related issues, like on-street drug use, public urination, graffiti, and aggressive panhandling. All of these conditions have led some businesses who planned San Francisco events to cancel them, exacerbating the problem.

Park Hotels & Resorts isn’t getting out of the hotel business. Its holdings include 46 hotels and resorts with 29,000 rooms. It has simply decided that two gigantic San Francisco hotels that used to be filled with tourists and business travelers just aren’t worth it any more. When hotels hit the road like that, it tells you something.

Missing Kids

In 2023, there’s been a disturbing trend in Ohio: kids have gone missing from their homes in numbers law enforcement personnel haven’t seen before. In the city of Cleveland alone, for example, 27 children went missing during the first two weeks of May. In addition, the Ohio Attorney General’s website include multiple pages of information about dozens of kids who have gone missing in Ohio towns and cities in this month alone.

Those numbers may not seem like a lot, in a populous state like Ohio, but they represent a spike in missing children–and of course every family that has a child go missing experiences incredible pain and anguish about what happened to their missing child. And authorities don’t know why this increase is happening.

There have always been kids who run away from home, but there seems to be a lot more risks and dangers for missing kids these days. Some kids are lured away from home by internet predators who engage in human trafficking or sexploitation, some are abducted, some join gangs or sink into a homeless drug life. And there is concern that the actual number of missing kids might be larger than what is reported,

Law enforcement is focusing on the problem and has made some progress. The U.S. Marshals Service has created Operation We Will Find You, a nationwide effort that targets locating missing children and returning them to their homes. The Marshals Service recently reported on the Operation’s specific effort in northern Ohio, which identified and recovered 35 missing children–who were found throughout Ohio and in places as far away as Arizona and California. A spokesperson for the Marshals Service noted: “The epidemic of missing children in our country needs a spotlight, it needs our focus. We hope operations like this sharpen that focus. Every child deserves a safe environment to grow up in, and we are dedicated to helping provide that for the children and families in Northern Ohio.”

People make fun of “helicopter parents,” but stories like this about the surge in the number of missing kids in Ohio gives some credence to taking an overly protective approach. It can be a dangerous world out there for our kids.

The Airport Den Of Risk

The FBI recently identified another security risk that we all need to be aware of when we are at the airport. Now we not only need to worry about unattended bags, keeping an eye on suspicious behavior of other would-be travelers, and avoiding use of “free” wifi that might be a ruse offered by hackers, we also need to avoid plugging into the USB ports at public charging stations at airports–or any other public places.

The FBI’s Denver office notes that hackers “have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices,” so you should carry your own charger and USB cord and use a standard electrical outlet instead. The FCC has weighed in on this risk, too. The hacking technique, alliteratively called “juice jacking,” involves the hackers loading malware directly into the public USB port that can then automatically load to your cellphone when it is plugged into the charging port. The risk exists because USB cables are designed to both transfer power and transfer data–which means that if the device with the “free” USB port has been hacked, it becomes a handy way to implant bad code onto the devices of unsuspecting travelers who just want to make sure they’ve got sufficient power to operate their phones or laptops while they are in the airport.

Once the malware is on your phone, it could allow the hackers to access your data and ongoing communications, use the information to commit identity theft, instruct your bank to transfer funds, prepare targeted “spearphishing” efforts that draw upon your personal information, or do any of the countless other evil things that hackers routinely do. You can avoid this risk by bringing your own uninfected charging cable and wall plug and then plugging them directly into an AC outlet–which is designed simply to transmit power, and not transfer data, too.

Airports are increasingly risky places these days, and the criminal element is always coming up with new ways to take advantage of common behavior–like the concern about having enough juice for your phone while you wait at the gate–to achieve their nefarious ends. At the airport, regrettably, it is safer to trust nothing and no one.