Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time—without the benefit of a warrant.
The Snitch in Your Pocket
Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials. But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "
Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.
How many of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most "don't have a clue," says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey. The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)
The Justice Department doesn't keep statistics on requests for cell-phone data, according to the spokeswoman. So it's hard to gauge just how often these records are retrieved. But Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting "thousands of these requests per month," and the amount has grown "exponentially" over the past few years. Sprint Nextel has even set up a dedicated Web site so that law-enforcement agents can access the records from their desks—a fact divulged by the company's "manager of electronic surveillance" at a private Washington security conference last October. "The tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement," said the Sprint executive, according to a tape made by a privacy activist who sneaked into the event. (A Sprint spokesman acknowledged the company has created the Web "portal" but says that law-enforcement agents must be "authenticated" before they are given passwords to log on, and even then still must provide valid court orders for all nonemergency requests.)
There is little doubt that such records can be a powerful weapon for law enforcement. Jack Killorin, who directs a federal task force in Atlanta combating the drug trade, says cell-phone records have helped his agents crack many cases, such as the brutal slaying of a DeKalb County sheriff: agents got the cell-phone records of key suspects—and then showed that they were all within a one-mile area of the murder at the time it occurred, he said. In the fall of 2008, Killorin says, his agents were able to follow a Mexican drug-cartel truck carrying 2,200 kilograms of cocaine by watching in real time as the driver's cell phone "shook hands" with each cell-phone tower it passed on the highway. "It's a tremendous investigative tool," says Killorin. And not that unusual: "This is pretty workaday stuff for us."
But there is also plenty of reason to worry. Some abuse has already occurred at the local level, according to telecom lawyer Gidari. One of his clients, he says, was aghast a few years ago when an agitated Alabama sheriff called the company's employees. After shouting that his daughter had been kidnapped, the sheriff demanded they ping her cell phone every few minutes to identify her location. In fact, there was no kidnapping: the daughter had been out on the town all night. A potentially more sinister request came from some Michigan cops who, purportedly concerned about a possible "riot," pressed another telecom for information on all the cell phones that were congregating in an area where a labor-union protest was expected. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of abuse on this," says Gidari.
That was precisely what Smith and his fellow magistrates were worried about when they started refusing requests for cell-phone tracking data. (Smith balked only at requests for real-time information, while other magistrates have also objected to requests for historical data on cell-phone locations.) The grounds for such requests, says Smith, were often flimsy: almost all were being submitted as "2703(d)" orders—a reference to an obscure provision of a 1986 law called the Stored Communications Act, in which prosecutors only need to assert that records are "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation. That's the lowest possible standard in federal criminal law, and one that, as a practical matter, magistrates can't really verify. But when Smith started turning down government requests, prosecutors went around him (or "judge shopping," in the jargon of lawyers), finding other magistrates in Texas who signed off with no questions asked, he told NEWSWEEK. Still, his stand—and that of another magistrate on Long Island—started getting noticed in the legal community. Facing a request for historical cell-phone tracking records in a drug-smuggling case, U.S. magistrate Lisa Pupo Lenihan in Pittsburgh wrote a 56-page opinion two years ago that turned prosecutors down, noting that the data they were seeking could easily be misused to collect information about sexual liaisons and other matters of an "extremely personal" nature. In an unusual show of solidarity—and to prevent judge shopping—Lenihan's opinion was signed by every other magistrate in western Pennsylvania.
The issue came to a head this month in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia. A Justice Department lawyer, Mark Eckenwiler, asked a panel of appeals-court judges to overturn Lenihan's ruling, arguing that the Feds were only asking for what amounted to "routine business records." But he faced stiff questioning from one of the judges, Dolores Sloviter, who noted that there are some governments, like Iran's, that would like to use such records to identify political protesters. "Now, can the government assure us," she pressed Eckenwiler, that Justice would never use the provisions in the communications law to collect cell-phone data for such a purpose in the United States? Eckenwiler tried to deflect the question, saying he couldn't speak to "future hypotheticals," but finally acknowledged, "Yes, your honor. It can be used constitutionally for that purpose." For those concerned about what the government might do with the data in your pocket, that was not a comforting answer.
The Swiss Bank UBS in the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich
Pick a dictator, almost any dictator — Cuba's Fulgencio Batista, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, the Shah of Iran, Central African Republic Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa — and they all have this in common: they allegedly stashed their loot in secret, numbered accounts in Swiss banks, safely guarded by the so-called Gnomes of Zurich. This association — of bank secrecy and crime — has been fed into the public's imagination by dozens of books and movies. It's a reputation that rankles the Swiss, who have a more benevolent view of their commitment to privacy — one that happens to extend to tax privacy. Don't ask, because we won't tell.
But the dramatic federal investigation of Switzerland's UBS has blown the lid off bank secrecy — and revealed how Swiss banks abet tax evasion on a far more widespread, if more banal, level. Over the past two decades, these secret banking services have been peddled progressively downmarket — first to the lesser-known fabulously wealthy, then to just the wealthy; more recently, private bankers have been tripping over themselves soliciting business from doctors, lawyers and other folks who are what the biz generally calls "high net worth" individuals. "The IRS has been concerned for decades that a combination of a global economy, the Internet, offshore banking, was really going to take offshore tax evasion from the old so-called 'gentlemen's sport' to tax evasion for the masses," says Mark Matthews, a former deputy IRS commissioner and now a tax attorney with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.
The federal investigation into UBS, which led to a $780 million fine and an agreement to turn over the names of more than 4,450 suspected tax cheats, is now in tatters after Swiss courts ruled against the executive-branch deal. To get around it, a special law has been proposed to accomplish the handoff, but that may not get anywhere in the legislature either. One outcome is already known: tax evasion had become a key service of the Swiss economy, not some isolated event. "They have been outed completely because a very large chunk of their business has been shown to include people cheating on taxes," says Jack Blum, a tax-haven expert. Being "reasonably conservative," he estimates 30% of Swiss banking is related to tax evasion, a figure that jibes with recently released bank data.
These revelations come as the financial meltdown has punched a huge hole in projected revenues for governments, which are suddenly a whole lot less tolerant of tax cheats. That's particularly true in Germany, whose wealthy account for a significant portion (at least 10%) of the $1.8 trillion in Swiss banking assets. That translates into hundreds of millions in lost revenue and is the reason the German Finance Minister recently thundered, "There's no future for bank secrecy. It's finished. Its time has run out." The Swiss are not going to be so easily convinced. The Swiss government has already warned that it will not cooperate with German authorities if they go ahead with plans to purchase purloined data about Germans with Swiss bank accounts.
The Swiss have a reason to be protective: the financial industry has afforded the small nation an enviably high standard of living, with massive capital inflows propping up its currency (the Swiss franc), making imported goods relatively cheaper. That's why maintaining bank secrecy has effectively been national policy for decades. As a Senate investigator, Blum got a taste of that when he tried to question a European representative for American companies in Switzerland who was suspected of commercial bribery. "I was personally warned by the Swiss ambassador that if I tried to talk with anyone about money hidden in Switzerland I'd be arrested," he recalled. "People understood that's where the hot money went."
Over the years, the Swiss government has also skillfully doled out intelligence dollops to its American counterparts to keep the U.S. government from pressing too much. That may have been one reason recently retired Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, who had butted against Swiss bank secrecy repeatedly since the 1960s, was not able to make many cases. The federal government is more earnest than ever, he says, but the resolve comes when the locus of tax evasion has already shifted to other havens. "Switzerland is not the No. 1 problem any more. The Caymans is the biggest problem," he says.
Still, recent reports demonstrate that bank secrecy is still very important for Switzerland and suggest how Swiss banks intend to maintain that secrecy for years to come. Credit Suisse, which took a net capital outflow hit of $5.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, reported it had about $100 billion of private, cross-border assets from politically sensitive or tax-sensitive countries. But when stress tested in simulations of widespread tax amnesties, it showed that $25 billion to $35 billion might flee. That sounds huge, but with some $800 billion under management, it's just a couple of quarters of growth, explains Matthew Clark, a Swiss bank-equity analyst with the financial-services firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc.
Nevertheless, says Clark, if you are planning to stash your millions in the Alps, don't assume you can hide it from the tax man: "There is no doubt that the ability to arbitrage the bank-secrecy laws in Switzerland to avoid paying taxes in your home country is eroding and has been eroding for a long time, and it will continue to erode."
What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 p.m. to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night? Or that a soldier who was assaulted when she went out for a cigarette was afraid to report it for fear she would be demoted — for having gone out without her weapon? Or that, as Representative Jane Harman puts it, "a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire."
The fight over "Don't ask, don't tell" made headlines this winter as an issue of justice and history and the social evolution of our military institutions. We've heard much less about another set of hearings in the House Armed Services Committee. Maybe that's because too many commanders still don't ask, and too many victims still won't tell, about the levels of violence endured by women in uniform.
The Pentagon's latest figures show that nearly 3,000 women were sexually assaulted in fiscal year 2008, up 9% from the year before; among women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number rose 25%. When you look at the entire universe of female veterans, close to a third say they were victims of rape or assault while they were serving — twice the rate in the civilian population.
The problem is even worse than that. The Pentagon estimates that 80% to 90% of sexual assaults go unreported, and it's no wonder. Anonymity is all but impossible; a Government Accountability Office report concluded that most victims stay silent because of "the belief that nothing would be done; fear of ostracism, harassment, or ridicule; and concern that peers would gossip." More than half feared they would be labeled troublemakers. A civilian who is raped can get confidential, or "privileged," advice from her doctors, lawyers, victim advocates; the only privilege in the military applies to chaplains. A civilian who knows her assailant has a much better chance of avoiding him than does a soldier at a remote base, where filing charges can be a career killer — not for the assailant but the victim. Women worry that they will be removed from their units for their own "protection" and talk about not wanting to undermine their missions or the cohesion of their units. And then some just do the math: only 8% of cases that are investigated end in prosecution, compared with 40% for civilians arrested for sex crimes. Astonishingly, about 80% of those convicted are honorably discharged nonetheless.
The sense of betrayal runs deep in victims who joined the military to be part of a loyal team pursuing a larger cause; experts liken the trauma to incest and the particular damage done when assault is inflicted by a member of the military "family." Women are often denied claims for posttraumatic stress caused by the assault if they did not bring charges at the time. There are not nearly enough mental-health professionals in the system to help them. Female vets are four times more likely to be homeless than male vets are, according to the Service Women's Action Network, and of those, 40% report being victims of sexual assault.
Experts offer many theories for the causes: that military culture is intrinsically violent and hypermasculine, that the military is slow to identify potential risks among raw young recruits, that too many commanders would rather look the other way than acknowledge a breakdown in their units, that it has simply not been made a high enough priority. "A lot of my male colleagues believe that the only thing a general needs to worry about is whether he can win a war," says Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of the Armed Services Committee. "People are not taking this seriously. Commanding officers in the field are not understanding how important this is."
But there are some signs that both Congress and the Pentagon are getting serious about this problem. It is now possible for victims to seek medical treatment without having to report the crime to police or their chain of command. More field hospitals have trained nurse practitioners to treat the victims; more bases have rape kits. "More than ever," Sanchez says, "I believe that our leadership at the very top is beginning to realize that they need to be proactive."
According to a report by the Defense Task Force on Sexual Assault in the Military Services, the progress made so far remains "evident, but uneven." The failure to provide a basic guarantee of safety to women, who now represent 15% of the armed forces, is not just a moral issue, or a morale issue. What does it say if the military can't or won't protect the people we ask to protect us?
Colonel Goukoye Abdul Karimou reads a statement signed by Colonel Salou Djibo, leader of a military coup that ousted Nigerian President Mamadou Tandja
The military coup that deposed Mamadou Tandja, the President of Niger, on Thursday, Feb. 18, could be seen as yet another putsch in a remote West African country, save for two things contributing to a growing instability in the region: cocaine and al-Qaeda. The coup is just the latest in a series in West Africa, making the region an increasing focus for Western governments in their ongoing battles against terrorism and drugs.
The coup itself was over just hours after it began Thursday, when shots were heard at the presidential palace in the dusty capital of Niamey, where Tandja was holding a Cabinet meeting. Late that night, a group of army officers calling itself the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy appeared on national television and announced the suspension of the constitution and dissolution of all state institutions. An unnamed uniformed officer asked the people of Niger to "remain calm and stay united around the ideals postulated by the council," which were to "make Niger an example of democracy and good governance" and to "save Niger and its population from poverty, deception and corruption." The whereabouts of Tandja were unknown.
Hope is becoming more common across Africa. Armed conflicts are on the decline, democracy is spreading, and economic growth is healthy. But rebirths can be fragile. And after a few years of optimism in West Africa, instability has suddenly returned. The past two years have seen coups in Guinea and Mauritania and the tit-for-tat assassinations of the President and army chief in Guinea-Bissau. More recently, the regional superpower, Nigeria, endured three months of political uncertainty when President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua underwent medical treatment in Saudi Arabia but refused to hand over power to his deputy for three months. (The transfer was eventually forced by parliament.) And on Friday, two people were reported to have died in Ivory Coast during protests against President Laurent Gbagbo's decision to dissolve the government and electoral commission, once again delaying a presidential election originally scheduled for 2005.
Tensions have been simmering in Niger since last year, when the democratically elected Tandja, whose second term in office was about to expire, suddenly assumed emergency powers and changed the constitution to extend his term by three years. As is the habit of autocrats, he justified his actions by saying he wanted to continue his mission of serving the people. And they need serving: Niger's population of 15 million is growing at the fastest rate in the world (an average woman there gives birth to seven children). Nigerians are also among the world's poorest, subjected to periodic droughts and famine. But Tandja's claims were made hollow by his track record in office — his government has been accused of corruption and harassment of political opponents, journalists and aid workers. Among those unconvinced by his motives was the West African regional group ECOWAS, which suspended Niger last October over Tandja's moves to hold on to power.
So why the new insecurity in the region? Two reasons are terrorists and drug smugglers, who have been attracted to West Africa by its weak governments and whose presence has weakened them further. First, the region has become a staging ground for operations by militant Islamists calling themselves al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a group largely made up of Algerian fighters who fled south in the late 1990s after losing a decade-long war against the government. AQIM specializes in the kidnapping — and occasional execution — of foreigners, something that prompted the Paris-Dakar rally to move to South America last year. In December 2008, AQIM kidnapped the U.N. special envoy for Niger, Robert Fowler of Canada, along with an aide and a driver. They were eventually released, together with three Western tourists — two Swiss and a German — reportedly after a ransom of $5 million was paid. But a Briton with the tourist group was executed.
Second, West Africa has become a key route for the trafficking of South American cocaine to Europe. Guinea-Bissau is now awash with the stuff, which is off-loaded along its coast and then transported by air, sea or land to Europe. The overland route across the Sahara is facilitated by Niger's Tuareg tribe, which has been staging a low-level rebellion in the northern part of the country since 2007. "In some cases, the value of the drugs being trafficked is greater than the country's national income," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, wrote in an October 2008 report on the situation. "[These countries] risk becoming shell states — sovereign in name but hollowed out from the inside by criminals in collusion with corrupt officials."
One of the world's poorest regions, West Africa already had its work cut out for it in trying to develop economically, fight the advance of the Sahara and establish rules of law. Now the world's largest terrorist group and biggest drug barons are in the mix — as in Afghanistan, only much larger. Niger adds an extra dimension to this worrying picture: it is home to Africa's largest deposits of uranium, needed to build nuclear power stations and weapons. And lawlessness is endemic. While I was reporting in Niamey last April, my car was attacked twice by mobs wielding steel poles and lumps of concrete, battering its side and smashing its windows. A senior civil servant who got into the car shortly afterward said such attacks happened every day and dismissed the rioters as "des gosses" — "kids" — as he carefully brushed broken glass off his seat.
Others are not so nonchalant. Last year, Jan Egeland, a U.N. special adviser on conflict resolution, said no place on earth was more deserving of international attention. Climate change, resource conflict and trafficking in drugs, arms and humans were combining to create "one lethal cocktail," he said. Speaking last year, a Western diplomat in Senegal concurred. "It looked like we'd turned the corner in West Africa," he told TIME on condition of anonymity, as per protocol. "Then suddenly it's coup here, coup there and cocaine everywhere. These things start spreading, and everything, everyone's interests, is down the tubes."
Two nights ago, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews awkwardly tried to compliment President Obama and the country at large following the State of the Union by saying, “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Naturally a Twitter backlash ensued, and the video is now all over the ‘net like white on rice.
Chris Matthews is no stranger to on-air blunders — remember that whole Erin Burnett thing? — but this one appears to have been a doozy.
Last night, after the State of the Union, Matthews was chatting on air with Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann when he started waxing poetic on how President Obama has come into his own as the leader of this country, and how racial divides seemed to have evaporated when he addressed U.S. citizens and politicians alike last night. That’s when the journo came out with the now oft-repeated phrase: “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”
Latching on to that one sentiment, Twitter commenters went for the jugular — there’s still shocked tweets coming in — prompting Matthews to come back just 90 minutes later to clarify. The journalist explained that, having grown up during a time of racial strife, it was striking to him that skin color had no impact on the interactions among the assemblage: a black president and a mostly white audience.
Despite posts to the contrary, Matthews was not seeking to make a racially derogatory comment in any respect, but perhaps he should have chosen his words more carefully. Later on in his ruminations, he himself goes on to say: “It’s so hard to even talk about; maybe I shouldn’t talk about it, but I am. I thought it was profound, that way.”
Yes, race is an exceedingly hard topic to talk about, especially when the increasingly plugged-in world is listening as closely as it does. The fact that Matthews came on back so soon after speaking because of what people were saying on a microblogging site is particularly noteworthy, though, and truly demonstrates how people can make themselves heard via social media. Take a look at the video below and let us know your thoughts on everything from Matthews’s sentiments to the public’s reaction in the comments.
Another uninvited guest made it into the White House state dinner made famous by gate-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the Secret Service announced Monday -- exposing more holes in the security perimeter around President Obama.
Unlike the Salahis, this newly revealed crasher got into the White House with the official Indian delegation. Many of the key details have not been officially released: the man's name, how he came to be with the group of diplomats and how close he got to the president and first lady.
But a congressional source, who was granted anonymity to speak about the ongoing investigation into porous security at the White House, identified the man as Carlos Allen, a D.C. party promoter who runs an event space in Mount Pleasant. The source saw Allen's name in official e-mails and documents pertaining to the Secret Service probe. Allen, 39, did not respond Monday to repeated e-mails and phone messages. The Post spoke with him last month regarding a comment he made to a blogger about having attended the state dinner; in the brief exchange, he denied knowledge of anything to do with the dinner.
The Secret Service released its statement following a report by Ronald Kessler, a journalist who writes for Newsmax.com. Kessler reported that the agency discovered the third crasher after examining surveillance video of arriving guests and found one tuxedoed man who did not match any name on the guest list.
The White House declined to comment about the breach, although an administration official, who asked to speak without attribution, said the White House has known about the third crasher since mid-December.
"This individual went through all required security measures along with the rest of the official delegation at the hotel," according to a statement released by the Secret Service. "At present, there is nothing to indicate that this individual went through the receiving line or had contact with the President or first lady."
The incident began early the evening of Nov. 24 at the Willard Hotel, where the dinner's guest of honor, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and his delegation were staying. Singh traveled separately, while his entourage of diplomats gathered to be transported to the White House. The State Department was responsible for vetting the list of official delegation members, and the Secret Service sent agents to the hotel to screen them with magnetometers before they boarded the van.
At some point that day, a group of prominent Indian businessmen -- late additions to the dinner guest list -- were allowed to join the officials traveling from the Willard and taken along on the one-block drive. Kessler reports that the Indian Embassy had asked the State Department to ferry the executives to the White House -- an unusual request for guests visiting the United States in a nonofficial capacity. Allen, a U.S. citizen, was among the group of business leaders.
After boarding the van, the group was driven to the White House, dropped at an unidentified entrance and not subject to further screenings or checkpoints. Allen -- like the Salahis -- was free to mingle with administration officials and other VIPs at the cocktail reception, but slipped out before guests sat down for dinner around 8:50 p.m.
The State Department, which is responsible for all visiting foreign officials, said the "incident is under investigation" but refused to release Allen's name or any further details about his movements that night.
A spokesman for the Indian Embassy said that the crasher was not a member of the delegation and that the embassy did not arrange for his access, but the spokesman did not respond to requests for comment about how Allen got on the van or if the embassy requested that the State Department add the Indian CEOs to the trip. But apparently he knew someone at the embassy: He rode from the embassy to the Willard with the delegation, according to the congressional source.
On his Web site, Allen promotes his event space as the "HushGalleria Mansion." Like the Salahis, he has a knack for getting himself into photos with famous people: Gen. David Petraeus at one black-tie gala last fall, rapper Drake and actor Jeremy Piven at other events featured on his Facebook page. An acquaintance of Allen's said Monday that she spotted photos of Allen, purportedly at the state dinner, on his Facebook page in the hours after the dinner, but that the photos later disappeared after the Salahi controversy broke.
The Secret Service said "procedural changes" have been made to deal with the way foreign delegations under the responsibility of State Department enter facilities secured by the Secret Service. It said this is an ongoing criminal investigation and referred inquiries to the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, which declined to comment.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said the new discovery may implicate not only the Secret Service, which is under the jurisdiction of the Homeland Security Committee, but also the State Department: "This incident, along with the terror attempt on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day by Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab may well show that the State Department is a weak link in U.S. security."
A woman accused of telling the Secret Service she would "blow away" Michelle Obama was in federal custody Tuesday as the Obama family planned to travel to Hawaii.
Kristy Lee Roshia, 35, was charged with threatening a family member of the president and assaulting a federal agent after being arrested Saturday less than two miles from the Kailua home where the Obama family planned to stay during a holiday visit later this week.
Roshia called the Secret Service's Boston office last month and told a receptionist, "I will kill Michelle Obama" and "I will kill Marines," according to a Secret Service affidavit.
During the same call, she said she would "blow away" Michelle Obama, the document states.
A message left at the federal public defender's office in Honolulu was not immediately returned.
Roshia has a history of leaving rambling messages and sending poems, love letters and photographs of herself to the Secret Service, according to the affidavit.
As early as 2004, she told the agency that "although her mission is to assassinate the president, she has no desire to hurt him," the document states.
The affidavit said Roshia acknowledged to Secret Service agents before her arrest that she had threatened Michelle Obama.
It also says Roshia said she knew where Obama would be staying in Hawaii, and the reason she had travelled to Hawaii in September was "to protect Obama."
Roshia was also charged with lunging at a Secret Service agent, striking him in the arms and face during her arrest.
She was being held without bail pending a Wednesday detention hearing.
Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It's a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you've just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special.
Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn't notice and wouldn't care anyway. He's as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a tinfoil hat. It goes on for a solid 20 seconds.
But Tobias isn't crazy. Far from it. He's a professional lock breaker, a man obsessively—perhaps compulsively—dedicated to cracking physical security systems. He doesn't play games, he rarely sees movies, he doesn't attend to plants or pets or, currently, a girlfriend. Tobias hacks locks. Then he teaches the public how to hack them, too.
Like many exceedingly bright people, Tobias has the exhausted air of a know-it-all. Over dozens of dinners, he has walked me through how to pick simple locks ("Uh, is there something wrong with your hands?") and bypass combination dials ("A brain-damaged monkey could do it faster"). He has described how to outwit security technologies like motion detectors ("Duh"), face-recognition software ("It's stupid, even if you think about it!"), fingerprint scans ("What child came up with that?"), and heat sensors ("You can get this one—maybe").
We've covered key card hotel locks over seafood, in-room credit card safes over sandwiches. While we ate a decent steak dinner, Tobias used the house crayons to diagram one of the largest jewel robberies in history; over dessert, he showed me how a person less honest than himself would pull the heist again.
Thinking like a criminal is Tobias' idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you've never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He's the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.
Lock-breaking is equal parts art and science. So is the ability to royally piss people off. Tobias is a veritable da Vinci at both endeavors. His Web site's streaming video of prepubescent kids gleefully opening gun locks has won him no points with mothers or locksmiths, and his ideas about how to smuggle liquid explosive reagents onto commercial airlines spookily presaged the Transportation Security Administration's prohibitions against carry-on liquids. Over the past 20 years, Tobias has been threatened by casinos, banned from hotel chains, and bullied by legions of corporate lawyers. And enjoyed every minute of it.
But to Tobias, pissing off The Man isn't the point, not entirely. Nor is it, entirely, to make himself famous or rich—not that he's allergic to either outcome. The point, he says, is to "make shit better." Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he's not a bad guy—he's just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren't actually locked, safe, or secure. At least, not from people like him.
The problem, if you're a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn't just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.
But forget bike locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals.
Between stabs at his salad, Tobias hands me his latest idea of fun: nearly 300 pages of self-published hacker-porn detailing his attack on the allegedly uncrackable Medeco high-security lock. "Trust me, this will cause a goddamned riot!" he says, dabbing at tears of joy with a paper napkin. "Oh yeah, this is way, way bigger than the liquid explosives thing!" And he's right, it is bigger—and with way, way bigger consequences.
Some Marc Weber Tobias problems rattle companies. Others end as consulting contracts or dropped lawsuits or forcibly improved design. But all Tobias problems, like all hacker stories, start with a nerdy kid in a basement workshop, taking things apart.
Tobias is Ralph Nader with a slim jim. Photo: Phillip Toledano
Tobias' basement was in the Denver suburbs of the 1950s, back when the global data carrier wasn't the Internet but Ma Bell. The Bell System said you had to use its equipment and protocols and pay a dime to access its network; Tobias figured out how to do it with a penny.
At the time, the saying was "Ma Bell has you by the calls." Young Tobias saw the company as a Goliath, "a big corporate monopoly intent on ripping everyone off." It was the perfect target for an aspiring pain in the ass.
With practice, the inscrutable pay phone boxes began giving up their secrets. Tobias was fascinated, then disappointed; once you saw how the machine worked, it was obvious, stupid even. All you had to do was hit the coin return thingy at the right moment, launch a penny into the nickel slot, and the circuit connected. Stupid.
And the stupidest thing of all was that the phone company counted on customers being more stupid than their stupid machine. To a 15-year-old troublemaker, this was either an insult or a challenge. Tobias decided it was both and decided to take it personally. Cheap phone calls weren't the point. Beating the machine, hacking the lock: These were acts of vindication, proof that you were right and others wrong, proof that you were better than the suckers.
Now Tobias started turning up at school dances—not to show off his Hand Jive, of course, but to showcase his new phone trick. It was a nerdy cool: David outgeeking Goliath. He felt a ripple of electricity whenever he teased a dial tone out of a machine, and at collection time the company men found pennies where nickels should have been.
But penny games were greasy kids' stuff. Soon Tobias started phone phreaking—building devices known as blue boxes that mimic phone tones to speak directly to the switching machines. Like his other Ma Bell trick, the point of this hack wasn't just to get free long-distance calls; it was to solve the most interesting puzzle possible. He had a lot of fun.
Recounting these triumphs delights Tobias, and soon his rant becomes a waggle dance of pure geek glee. His eyelids flutter as his eyeballs scan and rescan space like a stuttering robot. Tobias can present a closed and curmudgeonly attitude to strangers, but this subject opens him up like a tickled child. "All lock breakers talk about the intellectual challenge being like chess," he says. "But really, it's much better, because you're pitted against smart guys and millions of dollars of engineering designed to keep you out!"
Through the late '60s and early '70s, as his university campus exploded in drugs and protest, Tobias was monkishly working his way through the dorm's pin-tumbler master key system. For a solitary kid with fierce concentration and odd social skills, locks provided rewards the outside world never could. "Basically, I've given up women for locks," Tobias laughs. "They're dependable, and their problems are understandable—if you focus long enough, you can actually figure them out!"
On weekends he did file-drawer wafer locks, combination dials from lockers, and, eventually, simple safes. The technical permutations filled notebooks, then a filing cabinet. By senior year, Tobias was methodically chronicling his discoveries in what became a hacker's encyclopedia. Over the next few decades, this would evolve into a book and multimedia CD-ROM called Locks, Safes, and Security: An International Police Reference (1,411 pages; $220). In the trade, it's usually just called the bible.
Since Tobias had his sights set on being a professional pain in the ass, law school was a natural choice. So was a private investigator's license. And a polygraph license. And invitations to help sheriff's department investigations. Soon Tobias was trapping racketeers through wiretaps and rigging hidden cameras in hospitals and churches to catch junkie night nurses and pedophile Catholic priests. ("That was really fun," Tobias says. "Especially as a Jew.") And if in the course of an investigation a locked door needed opening or a security system needed circumventing—well, he had some methods for that, too.
By the 1980s, Tobias had settled into a career working the edges of law enforcement. His gigs had paired him with the South Dakota attorney general's office, the state highway patrol, and more than half a dozen police and sheriff's departments. He had been a PI. He had worked with informants in two states' penitentiaries and as a wired-up undercover operative buying dope, a prosecutor, and a consultant. He was a personal friend of the governor. By all conventional measures, Tobias was a successful adult. But somewhere deep inside, that 15-year-old tinkerer was still looking for trouble.
He found it by doing street theater to disgrace a parking-meter manufacturer in Sioux Falls, by planning a mock press conference in Minneapolis (resulting in a panicked attempt to ban him from the Marriott hotel chain), and by threatening to take his in-room safecracking show to the Vegas Strip. ("Caesars' security really didn't find it funny," Tobias says. "So I flew to a hotel near Disney World and did it there instead.") When the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor came and went without an apology from the Japanese government, Tobias decided to sneak-attack a Japanese company by decoding the magnetic key cards for its hotel door locks.
"Do I like to make trouble? Of course, I'm a lawyer!" Tobias says. "Ask yourself, why does a lawyer pick locks? The answer is liability. A lot of companies are arrogant and greedy and stupid bullies who put people at risk. They deserve to have a Marc Weber Tobias problem!" And year after year, Tobias delighted in creating them, hitting Elsafe and the Club, Targus combination and Master locks, iPod leashes and laptop cables. He did the Kryptonite with a Bic pen, post office boxes with a filed key, and electronic home security systems with a UHF walkie-talkie. He was having fun. And in response, the lock companies were forced to address his hacks by upgrading their technology. True to his code, Tobias' meddling was "making shit better." It was all going swimmingly. Then, in the early 2000s, he became increasingly fascinated with the crack cocaine of lock-picking: a technique called bumping. It would lead him to a lock breaker almost as obsessed as he was—and to the biggest security drama of his career.
Bumping is simple: Insert a filed-down key into a lock, then knock it with a hammer to momentarily pop the lock's pins into an open position. Like the Bic pen technique for defeating the Kryptonite lock, it's perfect for opportunistic bad guys; any idiot with a few tools and minimal skill can use it to open most cheap front-door locks worldwide. Though well-known in Europe, bumping was still relatively obscure in the US—until Tobias began introducing it at hacker conferences in 2004.
Not surprisingly, news of the imminent bumping epidemic was media catnip. Tobias was interviewed dozens of times for the kind of scare pieces that local newscasts wedge between weather and sports. It didn't take much to imagine all the paranoid scenarios: Kids study Tobias' online video, crack the lock off Dad's Glock, and put holes in things that shouldn't have them. Enterprising junkies embark on habit-feeding crime waves. Hotel rooms, no longer secure, become magnets for burglary and rape. High school truants walk the halls shimming combination locks off rows of lockers. Crime gangs use Tobias' case study to copycat the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, while tech terrorists simply co-opt the master list of Marc Weber Tobias problems to outwit America's Keystone Kop-homeland security and generally blow stuff up. The world is unzipped. And our innocence—not to mention a good deal of our cash, jewelry, and portable electronics—is lost.
Tobias shrugged off such concerns, along with the hate mail. Scaring citizens to attention is part of his educational program. "Do you really think ignorance will keep you safe?" he asks. "Is it even an option?" But what did worry him was the growing anger among members of the Associated Locksmiths of America, the largest lock-industry trade group in the country.
An ALOA member filed a formal grievance for violation of the association's code of ethics after Tobias spoke at the 2004 HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New York City. After Tobias appeared at the 2007 Defcon meeting in Las Vegas, ALOA threatened to kick him out of the organization for presenting security weaknesses to hackers and continuing to associate with enterprises of "questionable character." Since much of Tobias' income comes as a consultant to lock companies that rely on ALOA, for once he'd met a threat he couldn't afford to shrug off.
Tobias understands why some ALOA members despise him, and he's sympathetic, to a point. "They're pissed because I keep telling them that it's not a guild and that there are no secrets," he says. "It's called the Internet—duh!"
But Tobias' information-age philosophy belies a practical problem: Locks are not software, and you can't download a patch for your front door. Until someone pays to swap out that hardware, it's vulnerable. And so are you.
But where most locksmiths saw menace, a manufacturer called Medeco High Security Locks sensed a marketing opportunity. For four decades, Medeco systems have defined high security (a technical designation indicating resistance against covert-entry attack for 10 to 15 minutes, depending on which of two laboratory standards is used). While Medeco locks are obviously not the only barrier between an evildoer and, say, US nuclear codes, they are some of the best locks ever made—and over the years, they have secured most everything worth protecting: storefronts and corporate offices, even the Department of Defense, courthouses, UN buildings, and military and munitions facilities worldwide. And the company's newest line of locks, Medeco3, was essentially a promise in brass and steel.
Medeco trumpeted the fact that the lock protected the residences of the British royals and the US president. A press release emphasized that while cheaper locks might be susceptible to bumping, "not all locks can be bumped." And consumers should "know the differences." Soon Clyde Roberson, Medeco's director of technical services, also began appearing on those local news scare pieces, raising the alarm about the bump menace while touting a lock that, the news reports said, "can't be bumped." And Medeco didn't deny the "bump-proof" claims. (As this article went to press, the company Web site continued to link to the reports.) In August 2006, Medeco even filed paperwork to trademark the term bump-proof.
Bumping was a PR boon for Medeco's $100-plus high-security locks, and Tobias was the technique's American prophet. But even as Medeco's Roberson thanked Tobias for the publicity, the lock cracker had begun to preach a new message: Medeco's hardware was good, but not good for everyone—and certainly nowhere as good as company executives claimed. "I told them the whole 'bump-proof' thing was a terrible idea," Tobias says. One reason: a young Latin American locksmith named, coincidentally, Tobias. Like Marc Tobias, Tobias Bluzmanis had started his lock-hacking career by taking things apart down in his parents' basement (in this case, in Caracas, Venezuela). After moving to Miami, Bluzmanis spent nearly two years moonlighting in his workshop, obsessed with inventing a gizmo to determine pin position in Medeco locks. His lawyer wrote to Medeco, describing the device. The company evinced little interest, replying with a form letter.
When Bluzmanis turned to Tobias for advice, the older man spotted something special. It wasn't the invention—several lock engineers had designed similar decoders decades earlier, to no effect. The impressive thing was that Bluzmanis had done it without formal engineering training or knowledge of the previous efforts. Essentially, Bluzmanis had been clever enough to reinvent the wheel.
Tobias saw potential in Bluzmanis—and a possible partner. By July 2006, the two were meeting regularly in the back of a Miami locksmith shop, hunting for the Medeco's vulnerabilities.
Bluzmanis and Tobias are a classic odd couple: Bluzmanis is a tall, soft-spoken Venezuelan with a new family and a taste for red wine. Tobias is an outspoken, midsize, middle-aged, middle-American bachelor and lifelong teetotaler. But crouching geek-to-geek at a workbench, squinting into a puzzling keyhole, the differences didn't matter.
The lock-cracking quest took on the intensity of a recurring fever dream as night after night they employed paper clips, needle-nose pliers, a plane sander, safe-deposit key blanks, plastic sheets, lock-picking tools, tension wrenches, and lots and lots of paper. They divided the Medeco3 mechanism into a series of problems, then devised theories to attack each in order.
By December 2006, Bluzmanis and Tobias had discovered a method for opening the Medeco3 in about a minute. Tobias called Roberson immediately. "We figured he'd be as interested as we were," Bluzmanis says. "But he said, 'No, it's impossible; the locks must have been defective.'" So a few weeks later, Tobias sent Roberson the breached hardware along with a video of them opening a couple of Medeco locks. "I even posted the clip on my Web site," Tobias says. The password for access: Roberson's initials and phone extension.
Then Tobias and Bluzmanis sat back and waited. What did they expect? Perhaps a press conference, at least some attaboys for cracking the lock equivalent of Fermat's last theorem. They had just slain Goliath on digital video. But Goliath didn't appear to care. In fact, according to Tobias, Goliath was no longer returning phone calls.
Tobias says that even after five weeks he had heard nothing substantial from Roberson: "He said nobody had looked at the video or examined the locks; they were too busy. I mean, give me a break!" (Roberson says he can't remember the specifics but has "always appropriately responded to any reasonable inquiry" that Tobias made.)
But internally, Medeco was making adjustments. Online, the company changed its claim to "virtually bump-proof" and stopped pursuing its application to trademark bump-proof. Yet Medeco still wouldn't comment on Tobias' discovery. Nothing could piss off Tobias more. And so what had started as an intellectual pursuit now became a crusade.
Tobias needed proof, a confession. But Medeco would no longer engage in any substantial conversation with him. So he started using surrogates and taping the calls. "Customer service was still saying they couldn't be picked or bumped," Tobias fumes. "At the conferences, my colleagues were being told, 'Hey, Marc Tobias is just a crank and a liar trying to extort hush money from the company!'"
Sitting across from Tobias at dinner, protecting my food from flying spittle, I don't really need to ask if he's pissed off. But I do anyway. "What?" he shrieks, alarming the waiter. "Of course I'm pissed off! Everybody should be pissed off!"
"It's not about me. It's about what these locks protect," Tobias says. "Medeco locks are the best in the world—that's why they're used by the Pentagon, the embassies. These agencies believe that the locks can't be picked in under 15 minutes, that they can't be bumped, that you can't trace keys onto plastic. It's the definition of high security—and it's wrong! We proved it."
"Look," he says, taking it down a few notches. "If we can do it, so can the bad guys. Medeco needs to acknowledge it and let the locksmiths know it—and the DOD, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and all their clients."
Tobias blinks frantically, trying to clear this appalling reality from his view-screen. "You know, they could have just admitted the problem. Just said, 'Marc, you're right and we're wrong and we need to admit this publicly and fix it.' But did they do that?"
Tobias waggles an emphatic no. "Instead, they called me an extortionist and trashed the Marc Tobias reputation. And they're going to pay for that," he says, stabbing the defenseless tablecloth for emphasis. "Oh yeah, arrogance does have its price."
Cheated of intellectual laurels and shut out by one of the most revered lock companies in the world, his only option now was to go Rambo. He would take this Marc Weber Tobias problem directly to the public.
First, Tobias wrote another encyclopedic manual, called Open in Thirty Seconds, and in 261 excruciatingly detailed pages, he and Bluzmanis explained exactly how they exploited the Medeco vulnerabilities—and exactly how you could exploit them, too. They spelled out not only picking and bumping attacks but other Medeco3 hacks as well and crowned the work with a cheeky introduction "thanking" Clyde Roberson of Medeco for "making this possible." (Their DIY method for duplicating keys using a photocopier, an X-Acto knife, and some old credit cards will be included in the next edition.) Then Tobias had 3,000 copies printed (it's available on Amazon.com and his Web site), packed up his locks, socks, and underwear, and hit the road.
Maybe this meeting was in Myrtle Beach or Dallas or Dubai. Or Kuala Lumpur or Amsterdam or San Francisco—it doesn't matter, since nobody was officially here anyway.
Call them spooks, black-bag operators, whitehats, covert-entry men. You can't call them anything else, because the people who run security for federal agencies don't wear uniforms or name tags. They don't introduce themselves, and they never, ever speak on the record. When they meet, it's by personal invitation in rented rooms stocked with Styrofoam cups and nondairy creamer. Theirs is a universe of complete secrecy and total deniability, of national secrets and nuclear footballs, clothed in the anonymity of Dockers and Ecco walkers.
But even in this shadow world, these men had faith in certain fundamental truths, like the reliability of Medeco locks. These were the locks that defined high security. They couldn't be hacked, not quickly and quietly, not covertly, not with picks or jiggle keys, and definitely not with blanks cut from credit cards. These men had known this for sure, and for decades.
And yet they gathered last summer to sit in rented chairs and experience the latest Marc Weber Tobias problem. Laid out on a rented table were new Medeco locks, picking kits, bump hammers, jiggle keys, a paper clip, and a vise. Tobias clicked through his PowerPoint slides, then hit the lights. He stood aside while the spooks tried the technique themselves, one after another.
"Well, I'll be damned," said the man from the European military security organization.
"Good golly," said the man with desert cargo pants and a jarhead cut.
"Hmm," said the security guy for a US government acronym.
Tobias swallowed a smirk. "I'm sure you know what these protect..."
"Uh-huh," the American spook said. The lock was open. It wasn't supposed to be. He held it between his fingers like a radioactive turd. "This," he said, "is a problem."
Suddenly, it was all too easy to imagine real-life Tobias attacks: A mole in Defense or Treasury borrows a key for five minutes. He photocopies it and emails the scan, distributing a master key that can access a whole floor. And all those security protocols based on 10-minute response times? Now an expert covert team might take seconds, not hours or minutes, to open a target's door. Not every lock, not every door—but still, the impossible was now clearly possible.
And how long had the Tobias attack been out there? Did the Chinese have it yet? You could see part of the room thinking, "Holy crap, if the terrorists are half as smart as the hackers, they've already won," and the other part thinking, "Holy crap, how can we use this trick to screw everyone else?" Suddenly, there was a new menu of spy-world options, from embassy break-ins and bug placement to military, diplomatic, and industrial espionage.
"Even for high-security locks, it's never a matter of if but how long it takes a professional team to get inside," one clandestine federal security expert told me. "The Tobias approach changes that attack time for Medeco locks."
While a couple of minutes might not seem like much when that lock is protecting an ice cream shop, it's a lifetime in the covert world. "For high-risk targets, it can mean the difference between 'you're in' and 'you're dead,'" the expert explained. "So yeah, it's a very big deal."
But officially, Medeco wasn't so sure. Roberson was still adamant that he had never seen "objective verification that Tobias is able to do this himself in the times he claims, particularly under realistic conditions." Without independent verification, Roberson said, the Tobias attack is just a parlor trick performed on what could well be prescreened locks. It certainly wasn't a threat worth notifying the world about.
It could have just stalled there—an unresolved he-said/he-said situation, a war of words and words only. That's how it happens in the real world: No party is totally wrong, nobody gets sued, and nothing gets fixed. But of course that's not how a Marc Weber Tobias problem goes down.
Instead, on a blustery Thursday in February, I brought a video team, a chronograph, and six Medeco3 locks to a Wired conference room on the ninth floor of the Condè Nast building in New York City.
These were the same Medeco locks protecting tens of thousands of doors across the planet, the same locks Roberson said he'd never seen convincingly hacked—and apparently never will. Because while Roberson and ALOA representatives were both invited—and encouraged to bring along their own locks, protocols, judges, videographers, lawyers, technicians, and locksmiths—the invitation inspired only a 1,500-word response from Roberson and, ultimately, a flat refusal to attend what he deemed an unfair demonstration.
As it turned out, only Tobias and Bluzmanis showed up. They had a cheap rolling suitcase bungied with a small vise, a tackle box full of picks and tryout keys, and everything to lose.
One by one, brand-new Medeco locks were unsealed. And, as the camera rolled, one by one these locks were picked open. None of the Medeco3 locks lasted the minimum 10 to 15 minutes necessary to qualify for the "high security" rating. One was cracked in just seven seconds. By Roberson's standards, Tobias and Bluzmanis had done the impossible.
Afterward, Bluzmanis was exhausted. Nerves had kept him awake the night before the demo, and now he had Marlboros to smoke and a plane to catch. But Tobias was fired up. Fueled. Pumped. Ready for his close-up. And, as always, hungry.
"This isn't a salted earth campaign anymore," Tobias tells me over a post-test matzo-ball soup and Reuben in a decrepit Times Square deli. "This is Sherman's March now. Tell Clyde Roberson to look it up. Look up Atlanta. Look up Savannah, 1864. Look up Elm Street—if you talk to Clyde, ask him when they're moving to Elm Street. Because they're already in the goddamned nightmare!"
Thirty minutes ago, Tobias and Bluzmanis defeated the Medeco3. But by the time our waitress swaps out soup for sandwich, the Medeco3 is yesterday's news.
Tobias has already swiveled his sights to Medeco's newest tech—electromechanical locks that combine physical security hardware with electronic authentication. Smart locks like NexGen and Logic are the new new things, integrated androids of brawn and brains. At a few hundred dollars a pop, they're the expensive new things, too.
As of this writing, Medeco is peddling its Logic and NexGen locks for use in bill changers, token dispensers, and soda machines. They're already protecting sealed cargo containers entering American ports. They safeguard parking meters in major American cities and the security hub of at least one international airport. And under a contract signed last year, Medeco's Logic locks became the technological watchmen for security and data systems used by more than 500 agencies in Ohio alone. The US government has ordered even more for the offices of the Federal Trade Commission.
So surely, Tobias reasons, Medeco will want to know that its new locks could have a big new problem. "As far as we can tell—and there's still testing to be done—we're talking about a full-blown engineering defect," he says, "like the Kryptonite. Any idiot can hack these locks in 10 seconds! Without leaving a single trace that they were there!"
Tobias points his pickle accusingly. "Tell me every college Coke machine won't get stripped!" he yells. "Tell me nobody's going to treat parking meters like cash machines! Or treat bill changers like bowls of bar peanuts! Hell, even you could do it!"
Tobias grins a corned-beef smile. Then suddenly he remembers his pickle. It is, for now, the most delicious pickle on the planet.
