A 27-year-old man was arrested for allegedly trying to pick up a 15-year-old middle school student, Salinas police said today.
The man, Andrew Gaytan, was allegedly following girls near La Paz Middle School as he cruised around in a charcoal colored Mazda, officials said.
A passerby called to report the incident to police at 9:22 a.m. Wednesday. The caller told officers that they were trying to follow Gaytan and last saw him on Moreno Street talking to the 15-year-old.
Officers said that when they arrived, they found Gaytan trying to talk the girl into his car.
Their investigation revealed that Gaytan had contacted the girl three different times, police said. Officers, believing Gaytan was drunk, gave him a field sobriety test, which officials said he failed.
Gaytan was three times over the legal limit, police said.
Police booked Gaytan into Monterey County Jail on suspicion of driving under the influence and three counts of annoying a child.
Internet phones sold by Cisco Systems ship with a weakness that allows them to be turned into remote bugging devices that intercept confidential communications in a fashion similar to so many Hollywood spy movies, SC Magazine reported.
The publication quoted consultants from Australia-based HackLabs, who said customers had lost $20,000 a day from exploits, which also included attacks that forced the devices to make calls to premium phone numbers. The consultants said the underlying weaknesses were present in the default settings and could be fixed only by making changes to the phones’ configuration settings.
“The book says to shut off web services,” HackLabs’ Peter Wesley was quoted as saying, referring to the manual that shipped with the phones. “Who’s going to read all that.”
SC Magazine said that a Cisco spokesman advised users to “apply the relevant recommendations in manuals to secure their systems. There was no explanation why phones are by default open to the attacks described in the article. A more sensible policy might be to ship the phones with the features disabled and allow customers who have a specific need for them to turn them on.
The magazine didn’t name the specific make of phone, which is also susceptible to denial of service attacks. The article is here. ®
NEW YORK – Bugging by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid even reached a former deputy prime minister. Clive Irving on how Scotland Yard investigators messed up—and the wider ethical concerns.
In London the firestorm over telephones being bugged by reporters from Rupert Murdoch’s saucy tabloid, the News of the World, just escalated. This is becoming one of those scandals where the more the perpetrators want to bottle it up the more it won’t stay bottled.
The News of the World hacking raises wider concerns than just the ethics of tabloid journalism and the complicity of executives at Murdoch’s papers.
Two previous inquiries by the Yard were suspiciously casual, and in view of what has since emerged were more like white washes than investigations.
The latest investigation is led by a feisty woman, deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who seems determined to clear up the mess left by her male predecessors—no matter who gets embarrassed in the process.
Wednesday night she sent out an email to people whom she now suspects had been targets—as many as 20 of them. (Previously the Yard had put the number at 10 or 12). She even said that some public figures had been misled by the Yard when seeking assurance they had not been bugged.
The case of John Prescott is particularly poignant.
This larger-than-life rumbustious politician was Tony Blair’s essential lifeline to the working class roots of the New Labour party. Blair himself had a famously tin ear for the old-time grass roots faction. Prescott flaunted the perks of office, being dubbed “Two Jags Prescott” because he owned two Jaguar luxury sedans. And in 2006 he admitted to having an affair with one of his secretaries.
The new evidence turned up by the Yard apparently shows that Prescott’s phone was hacked in the month that he confessed to this affair.
Politicians I have spoken to here in London now believe that the News of the World hacking raises wider concerns than just the ethics of tabloid journalism and the complicity of executives at Murdoch’s papers.
First, there is the issue of Scotland Yard’s serial bungling—or, worse, of its self-restraint for fear of annoying a powerful media baron. And second there is the issue of how secure the phone conversations of senior ministers are. Tabloid reporters are not particularly regarded as masters of technology. If they can bug the mighty so easily, what about the real pros working for foreign governments or terrorist groups?
A federal judge in Omaha has ordered a woman and her father to pay $120,000 for bugging a teddy bear so they could spy on her ex-husband.
The judge ruled that Dianna Divingnzzo and Sam Divingnzzo violated wiretapping laws from January to June 2008.
Court documents say Dianna Divingnzzo put a recording device inside her daughter’s teddy bear in an attempt to gather information for the divorced couple’s custody case. A state judge has ruled the recordings couldn’t be used in court.
The ex-husband, William Lewton, and five others recorded by the teddy bear filed a federal lawsuit in 2009. A jury trial had been set for April, but the judge granted the plaintiffs’ request for summary judgment. Each was awarded $20,000.
Nick Brown, the former chief whip and key political ally of former prime minister Gordon Brown, became the latest public figure yesterday to say that he believes his private calls and messages were eavesdropped.
The Newcastle MP revealed that he believes his landline was the subject of an “amateurish” bugging operation around the time his homosexuality was made public in 1998.
Five years later, he was also approached by police investigating voicemail hacking claims and warned that his mobile phone may have been illegally accessed. The former Cabinet minister is the latest senior Labour figure to come forward with claims that his phone calls and messages were hacked. Tessa Jowell, the former culture secretary, revealed that her phone may have been accessed as recently as this week and she has hired lawyers to discover who hacked into her messages on 29 separate occasions in 2006.
Although it is not known in both cases who was responsible for the hacking, the claims will further fuel the phone hacking scandal engulfing the News of the World (NOTW), which is now the subject of a new police investigation following the decision of the Sunday paper to sack its head of news, Ian Edmondson.
Mr Brown, who was chief whip in the Commons for Tony Blair when he first came to power in 1997, said that his suspicions were raised following a conversation from a landline with an “important” person while his sexuality was still unknown. The MP said: “I picked up a landline telephone very quickly to make another call straight away. And the line clicked and then I heard my last conversation played back to me, which was quite eerie.
“I got on to British Telecom straight away. They said the line showed every sign of having been intercepted manually, not through scanners. It was an amateurish attempt involving the physical intervention of the line with a recording device.”
He added: “The engineer thought a recording device had been set to record calls automatically. I have no idea who did it but it was clearly not the intelligence services. I assume it was someone acting for a newspaper.”
Mr Brown, who also served as agriculture secretary, revealed he was gay after a former lover approached the NOTW offering to sell his story. In a speech to farmers the day after he confirmed his sexuality, the then minister put on a brave face, saying: “The sun is out – and so am I.” There is no evidence that the NOTW was responsible for the bugging operation.
Mr Brown added that he was then approached by an unnamed police force in the west of England in 2003 who told him that they were pursuing a phone-tapping prosecution and he was one of those who may have been targeted. The case collapsed when it reached court and full details of the allegations were never disclosed.
The MP said: “Given that it was near [Prince Charles’ home] Highgrove, my assumption was that this might involve the Royal Family. But I was never explicitly told that.”
Mr Brown, regarded as a staunch supporter of Gordon Brown, who has made public his own concerns that his phone was hacked while he was chancellor, called on Scotland Yard to make a greater effort to ensure such crimes did not take place again. He said: “The only people who can properly inquire into this are the police and they are right to review everything.”
A growing number of public figures have come forward recently claiming they were targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective who was jailed in 2007 along with the NOTW’s then royal editor, Clive Goodman, for illegally accessing the voicemails of member of the royal household.
The television actress Leslie Ash and her husband, Lee Chapman, the former footballer, said they were planning to sue after records of phone numbers belonging to the couple and their children were found on notebooks seized at the home of Mr Mulcaire.
Bugging by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid even reached a former deputy prime minister. Clive Irving on how Scotland Yard investigators messed up—and the wider ethical concerns.