Slashdot Mirror
Moscow Police Watch Pre-Recorded Scenes On Surveillance Cams
An anonymous reader writes "During several months of 2009, Moscow police looked at fake pictures displayed on their monitors instead of what was supposed to be video from the city surveillance cams. The subcontractor providing the cams was paid on the basis of 'the number of working cams,' so he delivered pre-cooked pictures stored on his servers. The camera company CEO has been arrested."
It took them five months to uncover this. If the contractor hadn't been greedy, it probably would have gone on a lot longer. It's no surprise though -- most camera feeds aren't encrypted/authenticated in any way. Nonetheless, the justice system and juries will rely on them as irrefutable evidence of a crime. And anyone who claims they were photoshopped into the scene will be laughed out of the courtroom.
The industrial espionage possibilities are quite lucrative.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What gets me is that they actually arrested the CEO over this.
If this had happened in the US, the company would have gotten a fine at most. Likely amounting to about a tenth of what they made.
And maybe a couple of low-level employees would have been fired while the CEO gets a nice bonus...
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
I get the impression that most of the cameras were working at some point, but failed. And this is why the company started sending fake (cached) images. I wonder how many were damaged by unhappy citizens. And I wonder what the company was thinking when they signed up to be responsible for replacing security cameras that they should have known were likely to come under attack.
Really this should almost be unsurprising. In any business, there's a huge incentive to outsource the most risky tasks just to have someone to blame when things go wrong. Personally, as a contractor, I hate working by the hour and would rather have my work judged on it's merits rather than by how long it takes. And for that reason I always have to carefully manage the amount of risk I'm willing to take for any job, and to weigh it against the fees offered.
Clearly in this case the contractor in question did not account for the amount of risk he was taking on. And clearly the Moscow police didn't have much incentive to take enough of the responsibility of securing their cameras on themselves. The result is the contractor in jail and the police acting like they had no idea there was any problem. Typical, really.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
No kidding. Sometimes reality has such a depressing bias. Maybe they should just replace the "nature" part of the show with something that's not such a downer, like action figures or NASCAR.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.