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65% of Washington DC's Outdoor Surveillance Cameras Infiltrated by Romanian Hackers (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:
Two Romanian hackers stand accused of hacking more than 100 outdoor police security cameras in the D.C. area during the days leading up to President Trump's inauguration, according to a court document obtained by CNN. According to an affidavit from Secret Service agent James Graham, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru are accused of hacking and disabling 123 out of 187 of the city's cameras between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15... Isvanca and Cismaru are also accused in the affidavit of spreading ransomware.
In a possibly-related story, the Washington Post reports: Five Romanian hackers were arrested over the past week as part of an international investigation into computer ransomware, officials in the United States and Europe said Wednesday. In six houses across Romania, law enforcement operatives from Romania, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands seized hard drives, laptops, external storage devices and documents related to malicious software called CTB-Locker or Critroini.
In a possibly-related story, the Washington Post reports: Five Romanian hackers were arrested over the past week as part of an international investigation into computer ransomware, officials in the United States and Europe said Wednesday. In six houses across Romania, law enforcement operatives from Romania, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands seized hard drives, laptops, external storage devices and documents related to malicious software called CTB-Locker or Critroini.
So you think what happened when the public tried to identify the Boston Bombers from surveillance footage is a good thing? It basically became a modern-day Salem Witch Hunt. While police corruption is certainly possible and needs to be rooted out, we've given police the task of criminal investigations precisely because we can then train a handful of investigators of these fallacies and how to avoid them, instead of having to train the entire public. It's a protective mechanism we've developed to prevent witch hunts. Opening up all cameras to the public short-circuits that protection.
Unfortunately, our basic psychology makes us easily fall for things which sound right but are wrong. Investigators reviewing surveillance video footage have at least some training to avoid falling for the most common of those fallacies when identifying a suspect. If you throw a bunch of random untrained people from the public into that role, they'll usually end up falling for groupthink and confirmation bias leading them to the wrong conclusion. (Releasing the footage after the investigation is done via a court order or FOIA can still be done.)