A Clayton County grand jury indicted a sheriff’s deputy Thursday on charges of invasion of privacy and obstruction of a law officer.
Alicia Parkes is accused of using a recording device to eavesdrop on another employee in a restroom late last year. In a separate 2008 incident, she is also accused of trying to prevent a police officer from arresting one of her relatives after Parkes called 911 emergency services. At the time of that incident, Parkes worked for the Clayton County Police Department.
If convicted, Parkes faces one to five years in jail and possible fines. About a half-dozen witnesses testified before the grand jury Wednesday. Parkes allegedly admitted during an internal affairs investigation to making the recording, according to testimony given during the grand jury hearing.
“It’s always a sad day when a law enforcement officer is indicted because it creates a little bit of a stain on all of us,” Sheriff Kem Kimbrough said Friday. “But we have an obligation to reserve final judgement on her until the court process works its way through.”
Parkes no longer serves as public information officer for the sheriff’s department, Kimbrough said. She is still employed by the department but is on administrative leave until Monday when Kimbrough said he will decide on her future with the department.
Parkes is expected to turn herself in, officials said. Parkes’ attorney, Ricky Morris, was unavailable for comment.
USANomad asked the Answer Line forum if people can eavesdrop on Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOID) phone calls.
Yes, they can.
But that’s true with cell phones and old-fashioned landlines, as well. From a technical point of view, phone companies and governments can pretty much listen to any wired or wireless conversation they want to. That’s why we need privacy laws requiring search warrants to protect us.
Of course, phone companies and governments don’t always follow the law. And even criminals without government or corporate connections can find a way to spy on your calls if they want to badly enough.
But these existing privacy issues get worse with VOIP calls, which have all of the security issues of the Internet and personal computing. If the person you’re calling has a conventional phone line, you’ve got both kinds of security threats.
The digital data of a VOIP call can be intercepted anywhere along the complicated path from your router through the multiple servers until it goes out to the analog phone network. Assuming your VOIP service doesn’t encrypt calls, whoever intercepts it can listen to it, as well.
Which raises the question: Does your VOIP service encrypt calls?
Skype does, with very strong, 256-bit AES encryption. You can read the details here.
But others are not as cautious. I know that Google Voice doesn’t encrypt their calls because a Google spokesperson told me so. Yahoo didn’t respond to my query, so I think it best to assume the Yahoo Voice (the service that USANomad uses) also lets their calls go out unprotected.
While encryption increases your safety, it doesn’t guarantee it. Your own computer may be the weak point in your VOIP security chain. If your PC is infected, whoever is controlling the malware may be able to monitor your phone calls and get useful information off of them. I have yet to hear of a malicious program that monitors transmitted audio data for key words like “credit card number,” but it’s certainly possible.
The best solution is to do what you’re probably already doing: Keep your security software up-to-date, scan weekly with another security program, avoid suspicious websites, and generally practice safe computing.
And, of course, your end is only half the problem. If the person you’re speaking to is also on a VOIP phone, they have the same security issues. If they’re using a cell or landline phone, their phones can still be tapped.
In the final analysis, there’s no such thing as a totally secure phone call, but unless you have reason to believe that someone powerful has it out for you, you can achieve a reasonable degree of privacy. For more on the issue, I suggest this excellent blog post by Bruce Schneier.
NEW YORK – A one-time billionaire hedge fund founder tapped longtime friends who worked for public companies for secrets to earn tens of millions of dollars in illegal profits, a prosecutor told a jury Wednesday at what the government has described as the biggest hedge fund insider trading trial ever.
“Greed and corruption. That’s what this case is all about,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Streeter told the jury in Manhattan at the start of his opening statement.
Raj Rajaratnam traded on secret information “again and again and again” between 2003 and 2009 as he operated a family of hedge funds at his New York-based hedge fund, Galleon Group LLC, Streeter said.
The trial comes more than a year after prosecutors announced that they had raised the stakes in their effort to root out corruption on Wall Street by using wiretaps for the first time on a wide scale to eavesdrop on the private conversations of insiders at public companies and at hedge funds. Too often, they said, those calls revealed insider information being passed around casually.
Rajaratnam has pleaded not guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. The Galleon founder, who has been free on $100 million bail since his October 2008 arrest, stood up briefly as his name was mentioned when jurors entered the room for opening statements.
Defense lawyer John Dowd told the jury “the evidence will show the government has it wrong. And the government has it wrong because it believed the word of unbelievable people.”
He said the government “ignored the public record and failed to do its homework.”
Streeter told jurors they would hear Rajaratnam on secretly recorded phone calls talking about insider deals and even revealing an effort to cover them up afterwards by disguising what was known about public companies.
The prosecutor said one of those calls was with fellow employees a day after he learned in October 2008 from a board member at Goldman Sachs that the firm was going to lose money for the first time in its history as a public company.
“I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they’re going to lose $2 a share,” Streeter said Rajaratnam told employees on the call.
The prosecutor said Wall Street had it “exactly wrong” at the time, expecting Goldman Sachs to earn a profit amidst the worst of the economic crisis.
Streeter said Rajaratnam saved millions of dollars by selling all his Goldman stock. A month earlier, he had earned close to $1 million when the same Goldman board member, Rajat Gupta, told him that Goldman had received an offer from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to invest $5 billion in the banking giant, Streeter said.
Gupta has not been charged criminally but has been charged civilly by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Streeter said the jury would hear from several of the 19 people who have pleaded guilty in the probe, which resulted in more than two dozen arrests. He said they would also view phone and trading records.
Advocacy group Free Press is alleging that a Californian company has been helping the Egyptian government inspect the contents of email, Twitter and Facebook messages.
IP network traffic intelligence company Narus – owned by Boeing – counts Telecom Egypt amongst its customers. And Free Press claims that it’s been using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to help the government eavesdrop on communications and even track cellphone users via GPS coordinates and SMS messaging.
Using DPI, it’s possible to reconstruct emails and attachments, see what web pages a user has clicked on and reconstruct voice-over-IP phone calls.
“What we are seeing in Egypt is a frightening example of how the power of technology can be abused,” says Free Press campaign director Timothy Karr.
“Commercial operators trafficking in Deep Packet Inspection technology to violate internet users’ privacy is bad enough; in government hands, that same invasion of privacy can quickly lead to stark human rights violations.”
Narus’ NarusInsight system is used by the US National Security Agency for surveillance of internet communications. And Free Press is calling for the US Congress to establish transparent standards for the use of DPI technology in order to preserve human rights.
“The harm to democracy and the power to control the internet are so disturbing that the threshold for the global trafficking in DPI must be set very high,” says Karr.
LONDON – British police revealed Wednesday it would contact thousands of people whose cell phones may have been targeted by the News of The World tabloid, an indication of the scale of the scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
Police have long insisted only a small number of people were believed to have been have been spied upon by the tabloid, which employed a private detective to break into the voice mail boxes of the paper’s targets and eavesdrop on their private messages.
But that contention has been challenged by lawmakers, fellow journalists and former employees of the News of The World, who have claimed that the practice was widespread. There have also been allegations that police were hiding the full scale of the phone hacking operation for fear of jeopardizing its relationship with the politically powerful tabloid.
The police have denied those claims, but the force has long been cagey about who exactly was targeted — and how many individuals were involved. Alleged victims of the hacking include model Elle MacPherson and actress Sienna Miller, and some have complained that police only gave them evidence reluctantly — fueling allegations of a cover-up.
Police said they were taking a “fresh approach” to informing people whose names appeared in documents taken from The News of The World’s private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.
“With this new investigation, we will be as open as we can be and will show them all the information we hold about them, while giving them the opportunity to tell us anything that may be of concern to them,” Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said.
Police have previously said around 3,000 cell phone numbers were recovered over the course of their investigation into the hacking, although police cautioned that did not necessarily mean that they were all targeted. Akers made clear that every one of the people connected to those numbers would be informed.
“In time, we will … make contact with everyone who had some of their personal contact details found in the documents,” Akers said.
John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister who believes the tabloid used phone hacking to get a story about his extramarital affair, said that in a meeting with Akers Wednesday he was told police now had “significant new evidence” relating to his claim that he had been a hacking victim.
“I now look forward to the police finally uncovering the truth,” he said in a statement.
