Archive for July, 2017

Pepe the Frog, mascot of the alt-right, dead at 12 – Salon.com

Pepe the Frog, the cartoon anthropomorphic amphibian adopted by members of the alt-right for use in hundreds of racist and pro-Trump memes, died at the age of 12 on Saturday. Pepes creator, indie comic-book artist Matt Furie, killed the character in a cartoon published onFree Comic Books Dayof Worlds Greatest Comics.

Born in 2005 in Furies web-published comic book, Boys Club, Pepe spent his early years as a wholly apolitical, if perhaps crude and cantankerous, creature often seen on Myspace. In 2008 Pepe began to appear in a series of memes produced across a number of platforms, with many reflectingthe characters original spirit.

Early in the run-up to the 2016 elections, however, the burgeoning troll culture of the darker corners of message-board site 4chan adopted the grinning frog, spinning his once-harmless visage into material for itsoften racist, often misogynist, often hateful memes. In time, he became a popular mascot of the younger, nastier side of then-candidate Donald Trumps wide-ranging group of supporters.

Furie, a self-identified progressive did his best to fight this rising trend, but to little avail. In 2016 the Anti-Defamation League classified the frog as a hate symbol and elements of the Pepe meme have been used by membersof the Trump-controlled executive branch.

In response to his creations now extensive involvement in the alt-right, Furie staged a wake for his character. A cause of death is not known at this time. Pepe is survived by an army of hateful, web-based dude bros, who will no doubt continue to employ his appearance in memes to come.

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Pepe the Frog, mascot of the alt-right, dead at 12 - Salon.com

CSI West Haven: Students attend forensic science camp at … – New Haven Register

WEST HAVEN >> Crammed into a University of New Haven-owned residence at 196 Rockdale Road, 36 high school students from across the country put their newly learned forensic skills to the test, trying to figure out what happened at various mock crime scenes.

Crime Scene Investigation Academy is a week-long program that gives high school students the chance to gain hands-on experience in the field of criminal justice and forensic science. The campers spent four days learning about fingerprinting, blood spatter analysis, and crime scene investigation as a whole, and Friday they got a chance to apply the skills.

We kind of walk them through the whole process of what it takes to process a crime scene. Both from the legal standpoint and the practical, and then we culminate it ... with this big [practicum], said Peter Massey, director of CSI Academy.

The capstone experience is extremely involved as the students not only had to document and photograph the crime scene, but they also needed to get search warrants, send evidence to the lab for testing and canvass the neighborhood for potential witnesses.

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Ellen Lassig, 17, of East Hanover, New Jersey, said she has been to other forensic-oriented camps, but they were larger and not as detailed and experienced. She said everyone participating at UNH gets the opportunity to do something.

Massey said there is no real answer to these scenes and that it is more a matter of process. He said what they are really looking for is ... can [the students] utilize the skill sets theyve gained during the week in this final product ... and present it in a public forum?

Bianca Randazzo, 16, of Norwalk, said while she learned how to determine the cause and manner of death as well as how to act at a crime scene, she also learned the how difficult the entire process can be.

You just think, Oh thats so easy, but then you come here and you have to figure out a whole scenario and you have no information. You just try to figure out by what you have, she said.

Massey said while forensic science and crime scene investigation may seem glamorous on television shows, the work can be pretty toiling in the real world, citing the long hours and unpredictable weather as examples.

The idea is to give the students a real-life look at how this works. They all watch the shows on television, and theyre learning its not like it is on television, Co-Director Daniel Maxwell added.

Some of the campers have graduated high school and going to college while others still are in high school. Maxwell said most of the students want to pursue careers in law enforcement, forensic psychology or forensic anthropology, and CSI Academy allows them to gain hands-on experience to see whether this is what they really want to do.

I didnt have opportunities like this in high school, but I think its a really good way for them to experience stuff like this, added Jennifer Busk, 23, a graduate student at UNH studying forensic science. I took a class that we do exactly stuff like this at UNH, but doing it as a high schooler gives you the opportunity to say, Hey, is this really what I want to do? and maybe even spark that interest and excite them.

Aaron Ostroff, 17, of South Brunswick, New Jersey, said his forensic science class last year was not as in-depth as CSI Academy. He said this camp offers him the opportunity to work on a real case as opposed to fake and silly cases he did in school.

This is the whole deal. This is not a summer camp; this is reality here, Maxwell said.

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CSI West Haven: Students attend forensic science camp at ... - New Haven Register

Science Could Make It Impossible to Get Away With Crime | Time.com – TIME

Somewhere in the 20,000 genes and 3.2 billion base pairs that make up the genome of Ted Kaczynski lie the genetic codes for madness. It wouldn't be easy, even today, to tease out those genes, and it was even less possible in 1996, when the man better known as the Unabomber for the 16 bombings he carried out over 17 years was at last apprehended.

There are a number of locations on the human genome that have been implicated in the development of schizophrenia, and Kaczynski has been variously diagnosed as schizophrenic or at least schizoid or schizotypal lesser related forms of the condition. Whatever his diagnosis, you don't wind up in a tar paper shack in a remote corner of Montana mailing out package bombs to strangers if you don't have at least a few genetic wires crossed.

As it turned out, even if DNA science has not helped diagnose Kaczynski, it did help the FBI nab him. After The New York Times and Washington Post published the Unabomber's 35,000 word manifesto in exchange for a pledge from the to "desist from terrorism," Kaczynski's younger brother David thought he recognized something familiar in the manifesto's writing style. He called the FBI to report his suspicions and investigators compared the DNA in saliva traces from the envelopes that had been sent to the Times and the Post to others Kaczynski had sent his family. A match was confirmed.

"It was a very limited amount of DNA; it was a very low level test," says Jenifer Smith, a 23-year veteran of the FBI who worked on the Unabomber case. "But it certainly indicated that he was in the category of people who could not be excluded. That became part of the probable cause that allowed the agents to serve search warrants on his property."

It was an investigative coup, a triumph of patient, dogged law enforcement and yet, as Smith says, it was comparatively primitive stuff. The forensic science of 1996 was a blunt instrument compared to what's available in 2017, and Smith, more than most people, should know. Today she is director of Washington, D.C.'s Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS), a gleaming new laboratory in a gleaming new building that conducts forensic work not just for the Metropolitan Police Department police but for numerous other offices and law enforcement agencies, including the District Fire and Rescue, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Public Defender Service.

The 220 investigators in the 351,000 sq. ft. labwhich shares space with the Office of the Chief Medical Examinerworked on 8,576 cases in 2016 alone, benefiting from technology that has grown exponentially in just a generation, from fingerprint and bullet identification to crime scene investigation to forensic chemistry to digital forensicsthe latter a category of criminal investigation that barely existed in 1996. All of this is helping law enforcement achieve its most fundamental goal: preventing lawbreaking when they can, and catching the lawbreakers when they can't.

"The forensic science we have today," says Karen Wiggins, a 25-year veteran of the District's Metropolitan Police Department and now director of the labs within the DFS, "makes it likelier that if somebody is committing a crime, that person is going to be apprehended and convicted and will go to jail."

If the science has advanced across the entire landscape of forensics, it is DNA technology that has arguably made the most progress. The ability to use genetic sequencing merely to put potential perps into buckets of suspects who can't be excluded has given way to an ability to make far-more solid identifications of specific individuals. There is only a 1 in 64 billion likelihood that a pair of unrelated people will carry closely matching DNA, though since tests aren't perfect, that's not the same as saying there's only a 1 in 64 billion chance of a suspect being misidentified. Still, things have progressed enough that done right, genetic testing can effectively make a case. But that business of doing it right isn't easy.

During the O.J. Simpson murder trial, just the year before the Unabomber case was solved, prosecutors relied principally on a form of DNA testing called restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), which involves cutting strands of DNA at particular spots and analyzing the length of the snips. In the same way that measuring two different people from, say, the knees to the ankles will typically yield different results, the length between certain target spots on a DNA strand will differ from person to person. If the strand length in a bit of DNA evidence left at a crime scene matches the strand length in a suspect, it's good news for investigatorsand bad news for the perp.

Still, such evidence hardly meets a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard, partly because other people might have the same matching strands and partly because RFLP requires a large, reasonably pristine sample to work well. The blood used in the Simpson case was recovered in small quantities from clothes, a car and elsewhere; worse, it was a mix of the suspect's blood and that of both victims'.

"The best you can say in a case like that," explains Smith, is "'Well, I can exclude all other people, but I can't exclude these three.'"

Things improved at about the same time as the Simpson and Unabomber cases were playing out with the introduction of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which allows investigators to begin with a very small DNA sample and reproduce the sequences over and over, providing more genetic material to study. Still-newer DNA analysis kits make it possible to study those samples in much more detail. Mixed stains, for example, can now be automatically separated by gender, which is especially helpful in cases of sexual assault, since those overwhelmingly involve a male assailant and a female victim.

DNA technology is making hair samples easier to study too. While hair is typically a poor subject for genetic analysis because it contains very little nuclear DNAor DNA drawn from the nucleus of the cellit does contain a lot of DNA from the mitochondria, the tiny energy-generating organelle within the cell's body. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the mother, which means it will be identical in anyone descended from that one woman. Again, that does not makes for a definitive genetic identification of a suspect; judging by mitochondrial DNA alone, David Kaczynski could have been just as guilty as his brother Ted. But it does help narrow the pool of possible perps way down.

All of this DNA data is now being widely shared among law enforcement agencies. Both nuclear and mitochondrial gene sequences gathered at crime scenes and collected from suspects by local, state and federal investigators are regularly uploaded into a national, searchable FBI database known as the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).

If there is a weak spot in the CODIS concept, it's that while science may always advance, law enforcement budgets don't, and a lot of DNA evidence never even gets processed, much less reliably uploaded into a national database. Rape kitswhich are used to collect evidence from victims in the immediate aftermath of an assaultare among the most powerful tools available to get sex offenders off the streets. Currently, however, there is an estimated backlog of 175,000 kits on the shelves of police labs nationwide awaiting processing. Nonprofit groups like End the Backlog are raising money to address this problem, but progress is slow and many offenders remain at large.

If DNA is all about the numbers, refining the probability of a match down to as many decimal places as possible, fingerprint and bullet science offers much less certainty. In both cases the challenge is all about recognizing patternsthe whorls and dots and bifurcated ridges in a fingerprint, or the unique pattern of scratches and grooves the interior of a gun barrel leaves on a bullet as it passes through.

Microscopes and even mere magnifying glasses long ago made it easy to see and photograph those telltale marks, but what came next was always painstakingly slow: looking really, really closely at lots and lots of fingerprints or bullet patterns on record to see if you could find a match. "We routinely searched a fingerprint against a million cards already on file," says Barbara Evans, an FBI veteran who started at the Bureau in 1971 and is now fingerprint supervisor at the DFS. "You're actually manually flipping through thousands of cards."

Actually you were manually flipping through them. Today, computers have taken on a lot of that work, with another databankthe Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)conducting massive searches of thousands or even millions of prints far more efficiently than humans could. AFIS was first installed in the 1990s and immediately slashed the time it took to find a match, and more-powerful computers have made things faster stilldown to as little as three minutes for a search that would once have consumed days.

Yet another databank called the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) does the same work for investigators looking for bullet matches, and the DFS ballistics division provides a lot of the imagery that gets uploaded into the database. In a glassed-in display room, the lab shows off upwards of 5,000 guns that District police have taken off the streets over the the yearssometimes going back a very long time.

"We have a revolver that shoots ball and caps," says Wiggins, with evident institutional pride.

When guns are freshly seized, they are often fired on an indoor rifle range at the lab and the bullets are collected so their distinctive markings marks can be scanned. If a pristine bullet is requiredone that is not flattened by impact with a surface as most bullets arethe gun is fired in a long water tank, which provides enough resistance to cause the bullet simply to slow and stop without making impact with anything except the bottom of the tank as it gently falls.

Forensic scientists are getting better not only at analyzing and reading evidence, but at finding it in the first place, thanks to improved technology for investigating crime scenes. In a basement garage at the DFS headquarters, a burgundy SUV sits off by itself in a parking bay. It was once the scene of a sexual assault and while the perp has long since been tried, convicted and incarcerated, his impounded car is still being used to train law enforcement officers.

To look at the interior of the car with the naked eye is to see nothing in particular. But to look at it in a particular shade of blue light while wearing a particular shade of orange goggles is to see it in a wavelength of precisely 454 nanometers. And in that light, ugly things happenas spots on the carpet and ceiling light up brightly. Almost any body fluid will fluoresce at 454 nanometers, but in this case the fluid is sementhough not from the original crime; that was all removed in swatches for evidence. In this case it was planted by trainers to see if new recruits will know where to look and what they're looking for.

"People will forget the ceiling," says Greg Greenwalt, unit manager of the crime scene sciences division. "But if a hand swings upward during a struggle, evidence can be there."

Blood, easily the most abundant of body fluids, is the only one that doesn't glow in the blue-orange filter, but it does show up as a ruddy brown. The left rear bumper of the old SUV is smeared with dry bloodbovine blood, Greenwalt stresses, to prevent biohazardsand once you've learned what to look for it's easy to spot.

"In the past, we would literally use a D-cell flashlight with an orange filter," he says. "The glass technology, the bulb technology, the light technology has all jumped."

Crime scene investigation is taking advantage of something approaching virtual reality too. DFS investigators now work with 360-degree lasers that take the precise measurements of an enclosed space, from the center of a room to all other points in the room, measuring them within 99.9% accuracy. These measurements are then married with equally thorough photographs of the room, providing a total immersion experience for jurors who can see where a crime was committed without the need for site visits.

Finally, and most innovatively, is the progress that's been made in digital forensics. Just a little over twenty years ago, if a suspect had any digital presence at all, it was mostly locked inside the hard drive of a desktop computer. Yes, there was an Internet, but it was slow and pokey and not much good for even the most imaginative of bad guys. A generation later, there's all manner of sophisticated cybercrime and that gives investigators both more policing to do and more tools to use to catch the perps.

"It's what we call the digital landscape," says Tracy Walraven, lead forensic scientist in the digital evidence division. "Everything is interconnected, everything has an IP address. Even when you're digging through just one digital device like a cellphone, the information could also be on a tablet or in the cloud."

Walraven once worked in digital technology both on Capitol Hill and at NASA and spends a good deal of her time investigating hacking and phishing and other more familiar crimes. At the moment, however, she is also paying attention to something that should be beyond such criminality: toys.

On a work bench in her DFS lab sit both a Furby doll and a Barbie doll, entirely innocent things except that they're also interactive Furbies and Barbies. A child can engage with them, talk to them and share information with them, which is fine as far as it goes. But the toys in turn can engage with other devices, and from there the information can get out to the world.

"We're looking at this from the creepy person's perspective," Walraven says. "We know how hackers think and how child molesters look at these toys as bait to lure."

So far she has not found any evidence that the toys are being exploited that way and she suspects that if she does, the companies will respond quickly to make the necessary fixes. For now, she believes, the best approach involves public service announcements to warn parents of the possible risks. On July 17, the FBI issued just such an alert, explaining what makes interactive toys vulnerable and how best parents can protect their kids.

Twenty-first century forensics are by no means perfect, and the DFS, like other law enforcement operations, has learned that lesson painfully. Just last March, the lab was rocked when news broke that at least 150 cases of firearms identification were being reviewed for possible errors. The month before there was a similar problem in the lab's public health division when it was revealed that at least nine pregnant women were erroneously told that they had tested negative for the Zika virus when in fact they were infected. In both cases, it was the DFS's own internal quality control that caught the problems, but it was a black eye for the lab nonetheless.

Smith, as the DFS chief, knows that she will earn applause for what the lab does right and will be judged responsible for what it does wrongand it's that second part that preoccupies her most. "Once you cut a corner, once you cross that line, you can affect the reputation of your lab, of yourself, of your discipline," she says. "That continually forces us to be the best at our game."

That struggle is an ongoing oneand the cunning of the perps themselves ensures that it always will be. But there's no denying that the crime-fighting science is better than it's ever been. In the eternal arms race between the people who enforce the laws and the people who break them, it's the good guys who increasingly have the edge.

This video was produced in partnership with Discovery.

The story of the Unabomber is the subject of a new Discovery series, Manhunt: Unabomber, premiering Aug. 1 at 9 p.m. E.T.

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Science Could Make It Impossible to Get Away With Crime | Time.com - TIME

Security Footage Released Relating to Camera Store Burglary (GALLERY) – Oil City

Posted 15 hours ago in Crime

Screen-capture from submitted video.

Oil City has obtained footage from a downtown security camera, taken the night of a burglary.

The investigation into the theft of several camera bodies and other high-priced accessories from Downtowns Wyoming Camera Outfitters is ongoing. Police have released very few details about the case, and have not released any footage themselves, however Oil City was able to obtain a copy of the footage from an area private business.

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Wyoming Camera Outfitters staff said last weekend, that they believe the suspects entered the building through the second-floor alley window, and absconded with several items of extreme value.

Reporters have shown several stills from the security footage to police. Investigators declined to say if the car or driver shown in the images is a suspect, however officers did say that if anyone has any information as to the identity of the person, police would like to speak with them.

The car is only visible for a very brief time, and is seen as the car is exiting the alleyway. The store window that officers suspect was used in the theft is not visible.

Screen-capture from submitted video.

Two cameras were able to capture images of the car as it drove by, from two angles.

After the vehicle leaves the alleyway, nothing is seen for many minutes, before finally police can be seen pulling up.

If you have any information about the case, please call Casper PD at (307) 235-8278.

Police investigate a downtown burglary on Saturday, July 22, 2017. (Trevor T. Trujillo, Oil City)

The victims of the burglary say they believe that the suspect was able to gain entrance through this 2nd-story window. (Trevor T. Trujillo, Oil City)

The alleyway behind West 2nd Street, between David Street and Center Street was closed for several hours on Saturday, during the crime scene investigation. (Trevor T. Trujillo, Oil City)

Tagged: Burglary, Downtown Casper, Police, Theft

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Security Footage Released Relating to Camera Store Burglary (GALLERY) - Oil City

With the European Union Livid, Congress Pushes Forward on Sanctions Against Russia, Iran and North Korea – The Intercept

A rare role reversal played out in Washington on Thursday night, as the Senate took a break from debating the repeal of the Affordable Care Act to pass a bipartisan bill that will serve to alienate U.S. allies and isolate America.

That job, of course, is typically reserved for President Trump, but Congress showed decisively that the administration doesnt have a monopoly on the practice, voting 98-2 to apply new sanctions to Russia, Iran, and for good measure, North Korea, too.

The Iran sanctions threaten to blow up the Iran nuclear deal, a landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obamas, one negotiated with both European allies and with Russia and China. The Russian sanctions have been met with threats of retaliation not just from Russia but from the European Union, which is apoplectic that the U.S. is threatening to undo its regional energy policy. And the North Korean sanctions, well, nobody really knows what those will do.

The bill passed in the House 419-3 with little objection. When the Senate took up a similar sanctions bill last month against Russia and Iran, the measure passed overwhelmingly, with Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rand Paul, R.-Ky., the only dissenting voices. They were again the only dissenters Thursday.

Sanctions bills against U.S. adversaries usually sail through Congress uncontested, and on a bipartisan basis. Few members of Congress want to vote against sanctions, fearful that the move could be spun into an attack ad that accusing them of being pro-Russia or pro-Iran.

Thebill has the enthusiastic backing of Democrats, who are looking to punish Russia for its election interference. Sinceseveral of the meetings between Trump administration and Russian officials reportedlydiscussed sanctions relief, coverage of the Trump-Russiascandal has dwarfed any discussion of how U.S. allies are likely to respond to new sanctions.

The sanctions may be a symbolic move for Congress, but they are very real to Europeans who do business with neighboring Russia. On Sunday, the European Union indicated that they would retaliate against additional sanctions on Russia, fearful that they would impact energy companies. A memo obtained from Brussels by the Financial Times said that the EU should stand ready to act within days if the bill was adopted without EU concerns taken into account.

Even the French government which has allegedly faced its own election inference by Russia spoke out against the sanctions. The French Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said the sanctions appeared to violate international law, and that the European Union would have to respond due to the impact on firms.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told The Intercept that the concerns of U.S. allies come second to the need to punish Russia for its election interference. I just looked at the sanctions, and its very hard, in view of what we know just happened in this last election, not to move ahead with [sanctions], she said.

When asked about international repercussions, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., a Senate newcomer who many are speculating for a presidential run, said she would be concerned about the response of allies. Thats part of the issue, isnt it? We have to think about it in the context of our partners and friends. I do have concerns, yes, she said after voting for the sanctions bill.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said he was satisfied that the EU concerns had been addressed. I looked at those concerns last night, he said. I know there were a number of changes made to the legislation to address the legitimate concerns. In other words, my view is that we effectively addressed the major concerns that were expressed.

Yet Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the leading champions of sanctions with Russia, said that it was the job of the EU to come around to the legislation, not for the legislation to be brought around to them. I hope theyll come around, he told The Intercept of the EU. Not that I know of, McCain said of any changes to the bill to accommodate them. Certainly not in the portion of the bill I was responsible for.

Another author of the bill, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., an ardent foe of the Iran deal, said that very little was done to take the EU concerns into account. Not much, to be honest with you, he told The Intercept. There was some sense of the Congress that we should consult with our allies, and there was something actually done for more about U.S. companies than about Europeans about any joint ventures that might include a Russian partner on oil. But other than that, nothing much.

Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, said that international allies concerns could be resolved diplomatically in the future. This would be the type of thing that in the ordinary course of diplomacy our secretary of state and secretary of commerce would be sitting down with leaders in the EU to resolve any misunderstandings. I dont believe the relationship of this administration with the EU has been that positive, and obviously theres some skepticism about what our motives are.

In addition, the new Iranian sanctions threaten to jeopardize the 2015 Iran deal negotiated by President Obama. Despite the fact the Trump administration has levied its own sanctions against Iran, the administration has certified that Iran is complying with the deal.

While the Iran sanctions bill was at an early stage, former Secretary of State John Kerry spoke out against it, saying it would jeopardize the Iran nuclear deal.

And Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has threatened to retaliate tit for tat. According to Reuters, Iranian state media quoted the president saying, If the enemy puts part of their promises underfoot then we will also put part of it underfoot. And if they put all of their promises underfoot then we will put promises underfoot.

President Trump has not taken a clear position on the bill. White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told CNN on Thursday that the president may sign the bill into law as is, or may even consider vetoing the measure.

Menendez said he wasnt overly concerned with the European reaction, and that it was up to the administration to smooth it over. Ive lived through this through every sanction Ive ever authored and it will take the administrations leadership to make sure we bring our allies together, he said.

Top photo: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., leaves a meeting of GOP senators in the U.S. Capitol on June 22, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

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With the European Union Livid, Congress Pushes Forward on Sanctions Against Russia, Iran and North Korea - The Intercept