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Murder Trial May Turn On Missing Router
bgood writes "The outcome of a murder trial taking place in Charlotte, NC, may turn on a missing router. State prosecutors believe that Brad Cooper may have used the router (never recovered by investigators) to make it appear his wife made a phone call from the house the day she disappeared. The trial is in its 8th week."
This trial is in Raleigh, NC, not Charlotte, NC. Fact check much, people?
How do you turn on a missing router? WOL?
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Sounds like some iron-clad conjecture.
He'll fry.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The trial is actually in Raleigh not Charlotte.
I barely even know her!
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Basically, it looks like the prosecutor has a totally plausible idea, but no evidence to support it. It would really suck if the guy got convicted based on that. Yes, it would suck, even if they guy actually murdered his wife, because for every plausible-but-unsupportable idea that is true, it's also false 99 times, so putting this guy away would mean we have standards that would put most innocent people in prison.
It's fine for investigators to come up with he-faked-the-phone-call hypotheses and check them out. It it totally fucking outrageous for prosecutors to be spewing bullshit at juries, though.
Is the router running ReiserFS?!
at least he didn't leave his glove behind
hypothetically speaking
how would you do it?
tell more
Murder Trial May Turn On Missing Router
If the router is missing, how will you know whether it is actually turned on or if it's still off? Or are they implying that the antanae will be raised? (giggity)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Complex? Impersonating the home line is actually a FEATURE sold with many of these services so you can call from lets say, your cell phone but have the call appear to come from your home. It often also works like a calling card does, making the cell call a local call. It is trivial to do.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Using a program that can talk to your modem, send the command "ATDT 555-1234" (or whatever number).
At least get the location of the trial right. It's in Raleigh, NC. The defendant was a VOIP CCIE who worked for Cisco.
"Murder Trial May Turn Off Missing Router."
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
This is really long stretch and will require recording of actual call and other details. You can fake voice message, but faking actual call is very difficult, never mind Hollywood showing simple voice changers as hot cakes available for everyone. Interesting legal theory though. As usual, needs facts and sound arguments why they are binding together.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Trial is taking place in Raleigh. Not anywhere close to Charlotte. Although I'm sure some non-NC people think that Charlotte is the only city in NC.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
Cheap? FTA it was a Cisco 3825S router which runs about $4k refurbished.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
It was a Cisco 3825S - which retails for a couple thousand dollars.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
True, but at the same time if their best piece of evidence is that he could have done it because he had the know-how, then god help anyone who is a VoIP engineer, knows anything about computers, or has ever used Google. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the fact that he supposedly borrowed the router from work and then never returned it points to his guilt. If it was pre-meditated enough that he borrowed a router for the purpose, why the hell would he raise a huge flag by not returning it - why not buy a cheap router to do the job, or wipe the router's logs and take it back to work at the very least? Being caught out like that sounds more like the plot for an episode of Columbo (and the fact that they'd then take such flimsy evidence as enough to prosecute on, doubly so).
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
The router in question is a Cisco 3825S, which he apparently borrowed from work.
If the guy worked at Cisco, in VoIP, I have absolutely no doubt that he could actually do what they claim. I could probably manage it myself if I had the right hardware and spent some time looking through documentation.
But it seems kind of silly to borrow a relatively expensive router from work to fake a call to try to prove your innocence...
Like you, I'm thinking he could probably accomplish this in a much simpler manner. Get some cheap little Linksys VoIP router, like the ones you get when you sign up with Vonage. Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script.
It seems to me that if he was thinking ahead enough to borrow that router from work to cover his ass, you'd think he might realize that there'd be a paper trail involved in borrowing that router, and that his ass wouldn't be so nicely covered.
But maybe I'm just over-thinking it...
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
A Cisco 3825 is not a cheap router. It is also complex, large, and heavy (2U rackmount.)
And he borrowed it from the office. It would be dumb to use it for that purpose (not that it excludes the possibility.)
So a guy has some experience, someone from years ago has a missing router, and we jump to "Aha! He stole a router and killed his wife." TFA doesn't say if there is any other evidence. A witness (who did tell different stories) said she saw the wife at the supposed time the husband was murdering the wife. They better have some better evidence than conjecture, because I don't want to get blamed for some crime just because I have an engineering degree and some guy I used to know stole a router and then covered it up by saying I stole it. Where is CSI when you need them? They can do magicky stuff!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
the file system of choice for murdering psychopaths everywhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Next thing you'll know they'll claim an IP address doesn't correspond to a person or something.
Heh.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
is the only city I can think of in New Caledonia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
This is precicely why I hope I'm never a murder suspect... I've fixed each of my friends and family's computers more than once, several times they've seen me quickly "hack" past their forgotten Windows, Linux, and router passwords (LMHash overwrite / Orphcrack, root diagnostic mode + passwd, or known default passwords / weak WEP respectively, nothing fancy). I actually stopped fixing a few peoples systems after they hinted that I may have been to blame for their machines exhibiting "suspicious" behavior months after I re-installed their OS due to malware infections (It's just more malware, idiots).
Sadly, I know my less tech savvy friends and family regard computer literate folks as magical neck-bearded tech-wizards (well, at the very least they see me that way, and have no problem believing any BS TV / Movie "hacking" demonstrations).
Prosecutors would have a field day, "This Hacker had the expertise and ability to break any security measures the victim may have had on their computers, networks and smart-phones. He could have easily installed a Trojan Horse Virus into the victim's computer and cell phones that made it seem like they were still alive and Tweeting the mundane details of their bowel movements, when in fact he had already destroyed their minds Lawn-Mower-Man style, and was in the process of disposing of their bodies in cyberspace."
"Mr. Cortex, Is it not true that you in fact own a T-Shirt printed with the phrase: I am The One? -- Clearly this is an admission of guilt, a cry for help. You are the one responsible, may god have mercy on your soul..."
Using a program that can talk to your modem, send the command "ATDT 555-1234" (or whatever number).
Ahhh, the nostalgia of the AT command set. The simple joys of writing custom mode init strings into your .bat files. The pleasure of automating downloads of bbs forum posts with Telix.
Seriously, anybody over thirty could do this in their sleep, if they owned a computer in the late 80s or 90s.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I didn't mean technologically complex, but logistically complex. Why misappropriate hardware from your employer, when you probably already have the hardware you need in a box in the attic?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Seems all the more strange that such an expensive router would go missing. If I had some rackmount hardware that cost 4k, I can pretty much guarantee that I'd always know where it is.
you are saying simply using the file system causes one to become a murdering psychopath?
let me look at the warning label...
body odor due to infrequent bathing, involuntary celibacy, paleness due to lack of sun exposure...
nope, nothing about murder
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How can they turn on a router if it's missing?
/scratching my head
They should build a GUI Visual Basic interface to track the ip to find the router...
Â_Â
Still cheaper than a divorce. Just sayin'.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Ah, but did you do those things with a gooey interface in visual basic? If not, you're not a true uberhacker.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
It was cheap in that he borrowed it from work, and it was never seen again.
That's circumstantial though. It could have been borrowed from his desk by someone else, who installed it somewhere to be found in about a decade. :) Retail value of $4k at Cisco is nothing in comparison to most of their product lines.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Reading other coverage about the trial it becomes clear that it is Fairview, SC actually.
It seems to me that if he was thinking ahead enough to borrow that router from work to cover his ass, you'd think he might realize that there'd be a paper trail involved in borrowing that router, and that his ass wouldn't be so nicely covered.
You would think that, but sometimes very technically smart people are dumb about murder, especially with regards to what makes them look guilty in court.
True, but at the same time if their best piece of evidence is that he could have done it because he had the know-how, then god help anyone who is a VoIP engineer,
From what I read, it's the other way around. *His* best piece of evidence that he *didn't* kill her is that his wife called him from home when the prosecution alleges she was already dead, which suddenly makes his VoIP experience very relevant. It is Columbo-esqe however, in that the accused has apparently tried to play the "I'm smarter than you, so I'll get away with it" game. That worked out pretty well for Hans Reiser, too.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
A real VOIP engineer would falsify the SS7 logs. Why F around with hardware?
Or if you want to F around with hardware, get a surplus security dialer and a simple timer...
He might be a "VOIP engineer" in that he pulls cable and the employer doesn't want to pay him overtime, so he's now an "engineer". Or he might be a real switch engineer. I don't know.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Why does everyone say router router router? Wtf happened to setting up a regular run of the mill telephone modem and calling task manager. Wow guys does it really need to cost $200 to pull this off? I bet most of you have access to an old analog modem or two, and a computer. Fresh install Win XP have the thing place the call, that night slick it, or install a new drive, lose the modem. Why a router?
Occam's razor.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
From the little detail in the article the question at hand is the time of death of his wife.
Apparently there was a phone call made from their home to the man's mobile, presumably from the wife, proving that she was alive at that time, and about to leave home for her normal morning jogging. The prosecution obviously believes the woman was dead already at that time, and they think the call was staged by the man.
So it's not the thing they prosecute on, on the contrary even: they appear to try to find a way to explain evidence that otherwise would acquit him.
Detective Columbo saw through a similar scheme in the 1970s. In that episode, a magician/murderer used a wireless connection to make it appear he was in another room while the evil deed was done. It seems like a VHF analog radio connection would have been a better choice for the Raleigh scheme; that avoids all the breadcrumbs left behind with digital connections.
> Seriously, anybody over thirty could do this in their sleep, if they owned a computer in the late 80s or 90s.
-nod- A quick command to make you seem a bit like a secret agent to anybody still on dialup:
AT M1 L3 S11=30 DT ###-####
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
OJ killed his wife! What rot! He is hot on the trail of the real murderer. He never passes a chance to walk through the rough between the 7th and 8th holes just to see if the real killer is lurking there. Why! He always has a pair of binoculars stashed in his golf bag and fishing tackle so that he could look out for the real killer. This being slashdot I will probably be modded down by some moderator with a preconceived notion that OJ killed his wife.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There are still people alive today to remember that quote ? I thought I was the only one who had escaped suicide after paying to see Antitrust.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Why does everyone say router router router?
Well, the summary mentions a router because the article mentions a router because the court case involved a router because the guy worked for Cisco and borrowed a router from work but that router has now gone missing...
Wtf happened to setting up a regular run of the mill telephone modem and calling task manager. Wow guys does it really need to cost $200 to pull this off? I bet most of you have access to an old analog modem or two, and a computer. Fresh install Win XP have the thing place the call, that night slick it, or install a new drive, lose the modem. Why a router?
Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script...
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Or jail-time for murder.
Best. IT. Deal. Ever!
A real VOIP engineer would have rented a cheap SIP line from the Ukraine and fired off forged packets with his wife's caller ID.
Or he could have used a trusty old USR Sportster plugged into the landline. You know, like we did in the 80s and 90s.
I'd say the big problem with techies murdering their wives is they fail to plan for the social ramifications. Sure, you can launch the body into outer space, never to be recovered, but how solid is your alibi story ? Do you have the acting chops to lie right to her family and friends' faces ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
just so you know - all of that type of call spoofing works with Caller ID not ANI which you have to be the bell to spoof.
ANI will show exactly what device called what device no matter what the caller id said.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
*His* best piece of evidence that he *didn't* kill her
Wrong way around. They have to prove he did it, beyond a reasonable doubt. He doesn't have to prove anything - most importantly he doesn't have to prove that he is innocent (which in a lot of instances can be really hard to prove even when one is innocent). Showing her to be alive at a time when the prosecution says she was dead certainly opens a big door to reasonable doubt. Also, creating this whole theory of how he could have faked the evidence, without any hard evidence on their own to prove it (like the scripted router), should also create its own reasonable doubt.
See http://www.wral.com/specialreports/nancycooper/story/9440639/
I could spit to the courthouse from here, and these are only a fraction of all the twisted facts:
All kinds of things SUGGESTING he did it, BUT-
This trial is ALL over the place from the prosecution...They have argued he both did it in a fit of rage, and that he premeditated it (such as acquiring the router)
The router is the Prosecution's response for his "alibi"- She was still alive that morning and called him from home while he was at the store before she went jogging.
Computer showed Google Map searches from his computer showing where the body was found before the authorities found the body
BUT- The Defense has offered that the time stamps are an invalid format. However, the Judge would not allow the jury to hear the testimony of the defense witness for this fact.
They said the victim was murdered after returning from a neighborhood party where she had been drinking quite a bit.
BUT-Defense says then her BAC would have still been elevated, which it was not.
He is missing a pair of shoes that he was video taped wearing after she disappeared.
A diamond necklace that witnesses testified she never took off was found in the house, suggesting he killed her then removed the valuable item. BUT-Store tape from two days before shows she was not wearing it then.
A set of supposedly really expensive decorative ducks were missing. The prosecution contended they were broken in a struggle in the house. BUT-Mother of the accused had them somewhere else.
Wife was divorcing the husband who was cheating on her and going to move back to Canada with the kids. BUT-She had had affairs as well and potential divorce proceedings could have outed someone else who wanted to keep things quiet.
The husband bought a tarp the day before- BUT the wife was expected the next morning to help paint a friend's house.
An exterminator says when he was in the garage, there was clutter everywhere, and no room to pull a vehicle into the garage. BUT-Police found a cleared space in the garage where a vehicle may have been pulled in to load a body.
What's crazy about all this the Prosection has gotten away with "It COULD be this, but it COULD be that"
I honestly feel this will hinge on the Judge not allowing the testimony for the defense that the Google Searches are suspect as well. I will contend that looks really bad if you are then not told something doesn't seem right about the dates.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Google maps. That's how they found Osama's hideout. OBL Hideout
really this is easy to prove, as when you spoof a call from a cell phone it is not listed anywhere in the originators caller's phone records, only the recipients of the call will have a record in their phone provider record. If you find the provider who the call originated from then you prove that the originator came from some outside phone service or voip service. The wife's phone records will not show a call or date stamp, only the husband's receiving phone.
Raleigh NC prosecutor = stagnated you mean? Slashdot didn't pull this story out of their ass, it came from the prosecutor.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
... I think of Rampling.
An autopsy report that she was most likely strangled is identical to a report saying that she might not have been strangled at all.
Then we have speculation about a router and how the supposed router might have been used by the suspect.
No way that any kind of guilty verdict would come from me on this case. Proof, not speculation, of the murder, the circumstances at the time of the murder, the place where the murder occurred and some hard connection to the various tools used to commit the crime need to be in evidence. How can one clearly know that the suspect still possessed the router? And how do we know that that particular router or any other router were in fact used in the crime? This case never should have come to trial. It would be a blatant miscarriage of justice to convict on the supposed evidence offered. Evidence is not argument nor is evidence a thought process or opinion. This sort of prosecution should allow the defendant to sue for damages as he was not charged with any real evidence to back the accusations.
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
I too don't understand what is so special about this router.
Well he probably had his own router at home anyway. There is nothing special about VOIP or SIP phones that require anything beyond what is available in your average user grade home router. Even for simulating a call from a remote location; opening a simple inbound SSH port would allow you to make an outgoing call by launching a soft-phone clients on a computer in the house.
On the other hand, the prosecution seem to be arguing crime of passion in the early hours after she was partying with neighbors, and at the same time that he had the foresight to borrow a router specifically for this task.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
Except you don't need a special router for this.
Voip/Sip is just not that hard.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If the whole case hinges on "evidence" of similar quality, the DA's office should be charged with malicious prosecution. It should also be forced to pay heavy compensation to the defendant AND the jury. It really sounds like they have no clue, so they blame the husband (always the go-to suspect in a murder). They have multiple witnesses and a phone record showing her alive after her husband allegedly killed her. Occam suggests that she was in fact alive at that time. The DA seems to prefer the theory that all of the disinterested witnesses are wrong and a router nobody can locate was used to fake the call. For that, they offer the "damning fact" that they believe he might have known how to do that.
I guess they assume the router is missing because he then cannibalized it to make his magic memory ray to implant false memories of seeing his wife jogging into the minds of random strangers.
Looking at the related stories links, they also claim he must be the murderer because her expensive diamond necklace was found in her home. The DA feels certain she would have inevitably worn it to go jogging. I guess the rest of their case really is just as bad.
just so you know - all of that type of call spoofing works with Caller ID not ANI which you have to be the bell to spoof.
ANI will show exactly what device called what device no matter what the caller id said.
That is not necessarily true. Some VOIP gateways are loose enough to let you spoof ANI too.
Is the jury gonna believe the Upstanding Officers Of The Law or the Lying Perpetrator? Prejudice and procedure trump the facts, in most cases.
Aside from that, the husband/boyfriend is almost always factually guilty, so the Police start from there and don't try too hard to look anywhere else.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The problem with most of these cases is the guy thinks he is sooo very much smarter than the police and prosecutor. So he gets a little cocky and mouths off to the wrong people. Or, decides that he knows how to manage his defense better than his lawyer, who just goes along with his cocky arrogant client.
First rule of crime is you are never smarter than the police, just luckier. They have rotten luck and the odds are usually against them. Which can be countered quickly by the prosecutor that is on top of the game.
This guy's biggest problem will be his ego. Second problem is while everyone is thinking he is going to go free, the prosecutor pops up with "the real theory" which doesn't need the router and explains the phone call away.
99% of the time the only person that can get really annoyed with someone enough to kill them is the person they are married to. The police and prosecutors know this and it makes their job a lot simpler. So, did this guy do it? Probably. Will the prosecutor's case fail without the router? Probably not. These lawyers are really good at coming up with stuff that isn't all that technical, whereas the techy types continually fall back on relying on technology and ignore basic facts apart from the technology.
Don't be suprised when a witness comes forth that saw the guy driving off after putting a really big, heavy box in his car.
Surprised @ the /. crowd on this one. First off, the missing router is utterly meaningless.
1) Lied to police
2) Used Google maps to search for the location where his wife's body was found.
3) Earlier called himself to "find his phone", but ended up leaving a 23 second message. When I look for my phone I call it and hang up well before it leaves a message. I think most people do the same. He was testing his alibi-to-be.
4) Told police he doesn't know cellphones. He's a VoIP expert, lol.
5) Shoes he wore to kill her vanished?
I think the jury will crucify him for #2 alone. The guy obviously tried to cover his tracks but did a piss-poor job. The circumstantial in this case has teeth. Poor Brad Cooper, guess there will be no Hangover 3.
Whoever mentioned ReiserFS somewhere up there is a funny, funny man.
"Seriously, anybody over thirty could do this in their sleep, if they owned a computer in the late 80s or 90s."
Only if I printed out a reference card. I didn't MEMORIZE this stuff! Any programmer over thirty could probably do it in his sleep, but us regular people not so much.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That's the best triple meaning headline ever.
Wonder what he was working on, must have been exciting to kill his GF and so deftly curb his alibi. This reminds me of some conversations I've had, I'm a kind of remote person, it really helps with "cold reading". But as soon as people learn I have a comp sci degree they look at me like I figured it all out with "hacker tricks".
:(
It's possible he's guilty, if so a loss to VOIP, our best bet for free anonymous communications.
But maybe he's being penalized for his specialized skills. This is why the stupid are so cohesive, they know the intelligent can lie to them with impunity.
I'm looking for a "stupid" charming sales person for my own voip company, we perfectly replace something people are paying $120 a month for with a $10 a month system, guess how many customers we have
Um, ATDT is kind of the most basic modem command in the book...
Put your tinfoil hat away. This guy isn't going to get convicted because he's perceived to be some magical voodoo-incanting techno-wizard. There's a pile of evidence against him, and that evidence will be assessed on its merits. One part of his defense is his claim that his wife called him after the time that the prosecutor alleges she was killed. The prosecutor is using the router to establish the possibility that the call could've been faked— which it absolutely could have. That's all. It's not the entirety of the case, nor is it even a moderately large part of it. The trial has dragged on for 9 weeks, and I promise you they haven't been discussing routers all that time.
Good thing for him that, in this country, you don't have to prove your innocence.
But on the flip side I toss old crap like routers and modems and sometimes even whole boxes (WTF am I gonna do with a 600MHz these days?) so if my GF comes up missing am I gonna gonna have to try to get the cops to go through the entire local landfill?
This thing sounds like they have been watching CSI play with VB GUIs too much me thinks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
99% of the time the only person that can get really annoyed with someone enough to kill them is the person they are married to. The police and prosecutors know this and it makes their job a lot simpler
This problem with this assumption is that it is a double-edge sword. Imagine, that the husband really didn't do it but the police and prosecutor assume he did. Now they have this piece of evidence that exonerates him and instead of accepting that their assumption was wrong and spending their resources finding the real killer, they continue their investigation against the innocent husband. Now if they push this to trial and the jury finds him not guilty, are they going to think they got it wrong and start looking for the real killer or claim its a crime of our justice system that a guilty man went free? Criminals aren't the only ones with a big ego's who can be cocky and arrogant to the point where it makes them appear stupid, police and prosecutors have been known to suffer from this as well.
I did a quick read of the case coverage over at WRAL and it does appear pretty darned sketchy for the state. In addition to denying the testimony about the invalid timestamps because the prosecution wouldn't have time to prepare a rebuttal, the reason for the late witness was apparently the fact that the judge disallowed the first defense witness as "not an expert". So their argument that they wouldn't have time to rebut is a little sketchy, if that story is right. The judge apparently did allow the prosecution to present the router evidence at the very last minute in the person of Chris Fry as a rebuttal witness. So disallowing the defense rebuttal witness on the computer files (apparently lots of files had altered timestamps after being taken into police custody, not just the google maps files). There was also some stuff about the police erasing data from cell phones.
The whole thing sounds really sketchy for the prosecution. They claimed quite a few things definitively that the defense was able to absolutely prove false. It sounds like there was a pretty good PR campaign afoot to prove the guy guilty in the media as well.
Having invested less than 15 minutes in the case, I couldn't say anything useful about whether the guy killed her or not. But I can say that I'm not at all impressed with the police/prosecution/judge team in the case. There seems to be a lot of disregard for a dispassionate arbiter of justice. From what I can glean from the press reports, there's a fairly unified team of police, prosecutors, press and judge all working to ensure a conviction, with a defense team and some of the guys friends working for an acquittal.
I really didn't like the last minute inclusion of a second lesser charge of 2nd degree murder by the judge. This smacks of trying to get the jury to compromise on 2nd degree murder - a charge that would be entirely incompatible with the case the prosecution has presented (a case for premeditated murder). The jury is apparently fed up with the trial and wants to go home. So the judge offers them a way to compromise between guilty on first degree murder and acquittal - just convict on 2nd degree and you can all go home! Pretty sketchy stuff.
Apparently there are several witnesses that say they saw her or someone who looked like her out for that jog later as well. A few of them claim the police ignored or downplayed their statements at the time.
Good thing for him that, in this country, you don't have to prove your innocence.
That's a good one. Did you make that joke up yourself?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
You have to be Bell, or you have to have a digital services line, such as a T1 or ISDN line. Those give an enterprising hacker the opportunity to mess with the Delta channel.
Not as common as they used to be, but still available, at a price.
That quote is from CSI, Antitrust was actually not to bad....
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
.bat files? Is that from some bastard version of vms or something?
lol
Being a Federal Judge who's experienced with F.B.I. testimony, I'd guess he knew their M.O., and might have felt insulted that they were trying to pull that shit again. My brother testified at a bank robbery trial once, (long story) and had the audacity to refute some lazy-ass F.B.I. perjury, the D.A. said to the jury "are you going to believe this guy or a sworn officer of the law?" notwithstanding the discharge papers that showed his induction date (in San Francisco) on the day they said he was in Charlotte. The suit and tie goes a long way towards manufacturing credibility.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
This is how it's done these days.
The guy no doubt is guilty of nothing but pissing off someone higher up in the legal system.
The judge disallows all evidence proving his innocence, and rewords conjecture into proof that he is guilty, then bribes the jury in this way. All standard tactics to lock away an innocent man, used many times in the past.
And they wonder why people think the justice system is nothing more than a joke.
Because it isn't. A sick twisted joke that was supposed to be abolished since the dark ages.
Someone I barely even know seems convinced that I tried to "hack his Facebook", because I am a magical hacker fairy who knows all his passwords (and, apparently, cares about his Facebook account). I'm tired of the mythos.
If I was being tried for murder, and probably lost my job, I wouldn't go out of my way to help the company. Maybe he re-loaned it to someone else. Years ago, I left a large corporation and the head of security for the company came to my home wanting an Informer terminal I had loaned to a senior manager. I told the guy to go away, ask the head of tech support for the equipment, since he'd had it for 6 months.
where the murderer programmed a robot to run a war game simulation that supposedly only he could do. I watched this episode a few weeks ago and the tech was quite funny in this day and age.
Ah, isn't it fun to see the result of legal representation being the industry it has become? As an attorney, your job isn't to make sure that your client receives justice or fair representation under the law, your job is to make sure that your client WINS THE CASE. Whether that means that a sociopathic killer goes free or not (not saying the person in question here is or isn't, there isn't enough evidence presented publicly for anyone to make that judgement) is irrelevant; you get paid the most (and get prestige, which results in more cases, which results in more money) by twisting the law and the facts in whatever way is necessary to convince the jury that your client is right (and thus, get a 'win' on your case record).
It wouldn't surprise me if not a single person on the prosecution's legal team actually believes that this guy committed the murder. They don't have to - their job is to get the jury to find the defendant guilty, not to find out the truth, just as the defense team's job is to get the jury to find the defendant not guilty, again regardless of actual truth. Sad, sad state of affairs.
Of course, the state of our legal system being such that you NEED an attorney to make any sense of it means that this isn't changing any time soon...
I have to agree.... Didn't even follow this story until now, but from everything I'm reading, it sounds like a sloppy job by the prosecution of trying to put this case together. Definitely possible the guy is guilty, but if they couldn't build a better case than this? They simply don't deserve to win this one.
It looks to me like they're just grasping at anything that could possibly work in their favor, throwing it out there in the courtroom, and seeing how well it sticks?
You'd best contact the defense team and let them know that then!
Or the prosecution, as I'm sure they'd like to know for sure.
If I recall, anything lower than S11=50 was not supported by most modems, and L3 generally overdrove the lousy piezo so much that the DTMF was nearly unrecognizeable as such.
I'm looking for a "stupid" charming sales person for my own voip company, we perfectly replace something people are paying $120 a month for with a $10 a month system, guess how many customers we have :(
Charge $30/mo and see if more people sign up.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
He used the Router ... as blunt force trauma.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
.bat files? Is that from some bastard version of vms or something?
lol
Yeah, it's output of the copy con text editor.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
That was my implication. He may not have been the one who used it, but may not have any knowledge or recollection of where it went.
I'm not going to re-read the article, but did they fix the time of death to before the phone call was made? Do they have evidence showing that his cell was not located at the house? There are plenty of explanations beyond the easy ones. He may have been there, killed her, dropped his phone somewhere in the house, and called it to find it. It's one thing to call your phone from the murder site. It's another to have the police find your phone there.
Any which way, it's circumstantial at best. He'd have to be stupid to take advantage of work equipment, plant the router, have it dial out to his cell to "prove" his innocence, and then make the router disappear. Want proof? Make sure you're a good distance away, start a bar fight, resist arrest, and then you have real proof. A sincere apology and no priors will probably get you probation.
Then again, none of us have all the evidence presented. They may have an air tight case. Using this circumstantial crap really makes it seem that they don't have any real evidence. If they had the murder weapon, her hair in the trunk of his car, his tire tracks at the dump site, and neighbors saying that he carried out "something large" at the time of the disappearance would be more damning than the circumstantial fiction.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I actually stopped fixing a few peoples systems after they hinted that I may have been to blame for their machines exhibiting "suspicious" behavior months after I re-installed their OS due to malware infections (It's just more malware, idiots).
Ditto.
People would try to tell me their passwords to everything, even when I didn't actually need them. When I did, the rule was for me to look away as they entered it, yet still they tried to tell me. When they did, I'd demand - nicely - that they change the password the moment I was finished.
Of course, they would usually reply that they trusted me, and could not understand that it was not about _them_ trusting _me_, and that I did not want to be held responsible anytime anything went wrong with their computer, because I "knew their password so it must have been" me who did whatever it was that happened.
And even though they loudly denied that would ever happened, many of them immediately blamed me whenever things went wrong with their computer at a later date, because I once knew their password(s) of course...
"Fix your own fucking computer."
Damn.. I kept using ATDP ... it took AGES to dial...
Cheers, Chris
Pff, who needed a modem to dial pulse? I called Time & Temperature by clicking the switch hook on the telephone.
P.S. Apparently telephone networks don't like being shorted across low-resistance speakers scavenged from old AM radios. But if you add a few hundred k's of resistance, it works...
there's a fairly unified team of police, prosecutors, press and judge all working to ensure a conviction, [...] Pretty sketchy stuff.
I live in Wake County and can tell you from personal experience, as well as seeing several friends and family members go through the process, that the police, prosecutors and judges present a unified front to push for convictions on just about every criminal case that comes before them.
When I was 14 some friends and I filled a plastic coke bottle with gas and set it on fire in the middle of the road. I was charged with "Possession of a weapon of mass destruction" and "maliciously assaulting the asphalt". My lawyer argued that the statute defines a weapon of mass destruction as a molotov coctail (and up from there) which was a GLASS container meant to shatter on impact filled with a flammable substance and a wick, and that I had no malice towards the asphalt. The judges said "you're right, but he's a juvenile so it doesn't matter I'm finding him guilty anyways" I was put in the first offender program and had to do 225 hours of community service with the marines.
This is just one example of how the law operates here. In the intervening years I have seen numerous examples of incorrect, trumped up and sometimes completely false charges stand through to a conviction.
The only time I've heard the words "Not Guilty" come out of a judges mouth in this county was when I was charged with possessing an open container in a vehicle. The cops only bothered to ask me if it was mine and didn't believe me when I said no. I had the guy who's beer it actually was (who was sitting next to me in the car, the cops separated me from everyone else to question me and write the ticket so he didn't have an opportunity to claim it at the scene) come to court and testify that it was his. Even then, the judge looked at me and said "I' don't think mister Draven understands what possession means, but I'm going to find him not guilty and have the officer charge mister Cooley."
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
I too don't understand what is so special about this router.
Well he probably had his own router at home anyway. There is nothing special about VOIP or SIP phones that require anything beyond what is available in your average user grade home router. Even for simulating a call from a remote location; opening a simple inbound SSH port would allow you to make an outgoing call by launching a soft-phone clients on a computer in the house.
On the other hand, the prosecution seem to be arguing crime of passion in the early hours after she was partying with neighbors, and at the same time that he had the foresight to borrow a router specifically for this task.
It's amazing that everybody is focusing on the router without realizing what made the router the perfect device for this task, assuming the prosecution's theory is true: there's no paper trail for it.
Could he have faked a call using any one of some dozen other possible methods, some simpler, some more complicated? Probably. Without leaving a trail? Probably not. If he were to go out and buy any suitable equipment, he'd have to dispose of it afterwards. He'd leave a paper trail if he purchased it with a credit or debit card, or an ATM transaction in the period in question that would establish his location at a certain point in the timeline. I suppose he could have been prepared in advance with cash, but then you'd also have to assume the cops are going to canvas electronics stores in the region with his photo if they're following up on the faked call scenario and think he purchased equipment to pull it off.
Some of the suggestions have involved ideas like using an analog modem, presumably triggered by VNC or some other method of remote control. That would leave traces in logfiles on his equipment at home that he'd have to scrub. A VOIP telephone adapter, like those provided by operators like Vonage, could have been used, but then the service provider would have those records, and again, he'd have equipment belonging to him to dispose of.
This "borrowed" router has no receipt. He can deny ever having touched it, and if they can't find the router, the only issue is credibility. Whether using it amounts to shooting a canary with a howitzer doesn't matter-- but it was never something owned by him, there's no document showing him having it in his possession. The real question here is, why isn't there a logfile somewhere that shows how the call was originated? Even if the router itself is missing, it had to be connected to a softswitch somewhere in order to originate the call, and there should be a CDR somewhere that shows what SIP account was used and from what IP address the session was initiated from, assuming that is how this was achieved. Doesn't the prosecution have to show the chain of events? Or are they just trying to say "yeah, he's a smart guy, he had access to techie stuff, so the call must have been faked"?
Dude, he was a VOIP CCIE who worked at Cisco. I think he was a real VOIP engineer.
Well then, I'd say Cisco needs to tighten their hiring practices. That's some serious lack of creativity and forethought...
-Billco, Fnarg.com