|
I just got off the phone a while ago with my friend Rustin, sharing some information I found doing research on what he told me last night... Late last night, he told me that he got this strange CD in the mail, and he thinks it's someone trying to pull off some nasty shit. It came addressed to him in a generic white disc mailer with a hand-cut, laser-printed label on the outside, with no note, and it's a home-printed CD made to look like an "official" Hewlett-Packard data CD. (From his perspective, he says it's more likely "Intel Inside.") The label has a few cryptic numbers on it, with "hp" in lower-case letters appended to it. The return address is 1931 N. Court St., Rockford IL (more on that later), but the actual mailer was postmarked from Palatine, an even smaller town in Illinois, which looks to be some 250km to the east (ie. not just "going to the post office in the next town").
My friend was in a fire last August (from which he spent 2 months in hospital and a considerable amount of time in rehab) and lost all his identification, and then lost his bank account due to some weird rules they have in New York State. He just got enough of his surviving papers together and sufficient funds to have his ID reissued. The mailer was postmarked the day after he went to the DMV and got his ID back.
I Googled the return address, and it seems to be the home of someone named Rebecca Venrooy who vaguely exists at www.recipecd.com. Apparently she's actually got a couple of phone numbers (which I've already given Rustin) and is an interpreter for the deaf... She also lives around the corner from someone named William Boykin (the same name as the US Lt. General who got in all that trouble for making those rather intemperate Christian-supremacist remarks)...
I had to find most of that out by some fairly circuitous means.
Anyway, Rustin says this looks like classic stuff from the '70s and '80s, and I said, "What are you doing now that's making whom nervous?" He said the only thing he can think of is he's discussed a proposal for a Constitutional Amendment regarding transparency in intelligence-gathering with me and a few other people. (I can't vouch for the other contacts, but at least with me, he was talking about it on the telephone, since he's in Manhattan and I'm approximately halfway between Detroit and Toronto.)
This is not the first time Rustin's been tangled up with this sort of thing, because he had some peripheral involvement back in the 1980s when he was a teenager interning with a company called Polysoft and working on a demonstration of a technique for tapping fibre-optic lines, something he came up with himself.
Fortunately, Rustin's been a working computer professional since 1985, and has got a safe environment in which to run the CD, happenstantially, and a suite of professional tools to clean up the mess afterward. We shall see...
Interestingly enough, Rustin's been having some small amount of trouble with his phone line (Verizon, of course) for some time, but that's nothing unusual...except that today, when he was talking to me (I called him to share the information I'd dug up hacking and slashing around with telephone directories, reverse lookups, and Google), he got an automated notification message from Verizon saying that his long-distance service carrier had been switched, which is not something he asked for. (I said, "Someone slammed you!")
All of us connected to him going to be just a little bit more careful about our "security of the person" from now on, including me. With luck, this is a statistical anomaly, and/or someone trying some elaborate social engineering, or just playing a nasty practical joke. On the other hand, better safe than sorry. (Yes, I realise that there are jurisdictional issues, but precisely when has that ever stopped a determined governmental agency before?)
I thought I'd put it out to the DU community -- your thoughts?
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
:thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: 
