PI Newswire

Sailing across the Atlantic would be a gruelling task for the fittest of men.

But Graham Axford managed the feat in his private yacht – despite claiming he was unfit to work because of a bad back.

The 57-year-old tackled some of the world’s most dangerous waters while claiming thousands of pounds in incapacity benefit over a 15-year period.

He was caught out when it emerged he had made a month-long voyage from America to the Azores.

The benefits claimant also lived in a council house in Croydon, South London, despite part-owning a farmhouse in Normandy. Mr Axford was apparently exposed living a double-life by a BBC Panorama investigation, which airs tonight.

The keen sailor started receiving incapacity benefit in 1996, after injuring his back in a motorcycle accident.

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The US Internal Revenue Service is auditing strategies that Google uses to cut its tax bill by about $1 billion a year by funneling profit into subsidiaries located in territories with low or non-existent rates, according to a published report citing unnamed officials.

The agency is “bringing more than typical scrutiny” to techniques known as the “Double Irish” and “Dutch Sandwich,” which move profits through units in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Bermuda, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. Last year, Bloomberg reported that the practice had saved Google $3.1 billion in just three years.

In 2009 alone, a Google subsidiary located in Bermuda, where there’s no corporate income tax, collected about $6.1 billion in royalties from a separate Google unit located in the Netherlands, Bloomberg reported. By transferring profits out of the US and other territories where rates are high, Google is able to drastically lower its costs. On Thursday, Google reported an effective tax rate of about 19 percent for third quarter, less than half the average combined US and state statutory rate of 39.2.

Google is by no means alone in pursuing the strategy. US companies are sitting on at least $1.375 trillion in earnings in their foreign subsidiaries that aren’t subject to income taxes. If the earnings were transferred to the US, they would face a 35-percent corporate rate. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco Systems use similar vehicles to avoid federal income taxes, but it’s not clear they do so with the same spectacular success.

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Responding crime scene officer(s) must have the following items readily available. Officers should keep them in police vehicles or readily available toolkits.

•Bindle paper.
•Biohazard bags.
•Bodily fluid collection kit (sterile swabs, distilled water, — optional presumptive tests [opens in pop-up window], and sterile packaging that allows the swabs to air dry).
•Camera (plus memory cards, back up battery, remote flash, tripod and remote cord).
•Evidence seals/tape.
•Flashlight(s) with extra batteries.
•Footwear casting materials.
•Graph paper and pencils, small ruler or straight edge.
•Latent print [opens in pop-up window] kit.
•Measuring devices (e.g, measuring wheel, tape measures of varying lengths).
•Multifunction utility tool.
•Notebook.
•Paper bags (various sizes).
•Permanent markers.
•Personal protective equipment (e.g., gloves, booties, hair covering, overalls and mask).
•Placards.
•Plastic resealable bags (various sizes)
•Scales for photography.
•Spray paint, chalk, etc.
•Syringe/knife tubes.
•Tweezers(disposable).

Optional items. Officers may need to use other items, and may wish to have them readily available in their police vehicle. These items include:

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The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced today that it has proposed the removal of more than 30 Honolulu International Airport (HNL) TSA employees following an extensive investigation into allegations of improper screening of checked baggage.

“TSA holds its workforce to the highest ethical standards and we will not tolerate employees who in any way compromise the security of the traveling public,” said TSA Administrator John Pistole. “We have taken appropriate action through our newly established Office of Professional Responsibility and are committed to ensuring our high security standards are upheld in Hawaii and throughout the country.”

As announced earlier this year, TSA placed several officers in non-security related roles pending the outcome of the internal investigation. The investigation determined that some checked baggage during one shift, at one airport location was not properly screened, impacting a limited number of flights each day during the last few months of 2010.

TSA has taken the necessary steps to ensure every bag has been screened properly at HNL since the agency identified the issue. TSA routinely tests security operations to ensure that proper protocols are being followed, and investigates any indication of misconduct. TSA also utilizes a number of checks to ensure bags are being screened properly including the use of CCTV, random inspections, covert tests, as well as peer and management oversight.

TSA management-level staff and National Deployment Force officers have been temporarily assigned to HNL to augment the current staff and continue to ensure that a high level of security operations continues. An effort will commence to hire local permanent replacements in the coming weeks.

Stanford Miyamoto, currently the Deputy Area Director, has been named Acting Federal Security Director.

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After spending hours in a patrol car with his young children, Kenneth Wright claimed that a SWAT team had broken into his Stockton home on Tuesday morning in order to execute a student loan warrant after his estranged wife failed to pay her bills.

While his house was searched, it was not by a SWAT team, and it wasn’t because his wife failed to make loan payments.

It turns out that the raid was the handiwork of the Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General, which is conducting an investigation into student loan fraud.

Since this story broke, there’s been a lot of confusion out there about the ability of the DOE to execute a warrant. Here are the facts.

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 amended the Inspector General Act of 1978 to allow the DOE’s Inspector General to carry firearms, make arrests, and seek and execute warrants for investigatory purposes.

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The prospect of trying to obtain legally defensible digital evidence from the Internet is headache-worthy to many—but not impossible. Rather than collect, examine, analyze, and report as computer forensic examiners do, investigators instead need to collect and preserve the evidence as found for later presentation.

“Internet forensics” is not unlike network forensics, which requires the capture of “live” data in transit from one computer to another. However, with network forensics, the examiner has some degree of control over the network and the hard drives (computers) being examined. On the Internet, the investigator has no control over the “other end,” and so can only obtain a snapshot of what exists at a given point in time.

Data that can be useful to the investigator includes Web pages, social networking sites, and various chat-based applications. All this information is transmitted via various methods. For example, criminals may intentionally use tools that occupy volatile computing space (RAM), such as instant messaging and chat programs.

Unless the examiner is using a client that saves such conversations to a log file on the hard drive, they are not subject to traditional forensic capture (i.e. recovered chat conversation in a suspect’s computer’s unallocated space). Thus, capture must occur from the user, such as an undercover officer, initiating the connection and recording the conversation.

Moreover, basic forensic tools collect and analyze electronically stored information (ESI) at rest, not that which is moving through a network or stored in RAM. Additionally, while many of the forensics tool manufacturers are addressing collection of data in transit (data existing on or moving from and between networks), such software can only collect data under the examiner’s control—via a network device physically accessible to the examiner, or through the use of an applet (code the examiner can push to a remote computer and gain control of). The collection of data outside of the user’s control, as that on the Internet or the “cloud,” is not addressed.

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It was a broken heart that may have helped solve this murder…

In January 2008, 26-year-old Dewayne Barrentine of Marianna, Fla., discovered his girlfriend, Tausha Fields, had been cheating on him. Hurt, angry, and humiliated, Dewayne went online to learn all he could about his now ex-girlfriend, including how long she had been seeing another man.

This wouldn’t be the first time Dewayne searched the Internet for information on the woman he loved. Right from the start, Tausha had made it clear to Dewayne she didn’t like talking about her past. What few stories she did share were so bizarre, so disturbing, and so unbelievable that Dewayne felt compelled to try and confirm them. One online search led him to an old marriage license with Tausha’s name on it. When he confronted Tausha with the document, he said his 32-year-old girlfriend admitted she had been married before: not just once but five times!

But it was the revelation of Tausha’s infidelity that sent Dewayne’s investigative skills into overdrive. What he ultimately discovered was far more shocking than he could have ever imagined. It turns out one of Tausha’s ex-husbands had been missing for four years. After countless Google searches and candid conversations with Tausha’s old acquaintances, Dewayne began to suspect Tausha may have had something to do with her ex-husband’s disappearance. So he presented his findings to police. Soon, Dewayne wasn’t the only one wondering about Tausha’s connection to the man who had vanished without a trace.

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Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has announced she will investigate how Veterans Affairs handles the personal information of wounded Canadian soldiers, after she found evidence that widespread privacy violations may have taken place at the department.

Valerie Lawton, a spokesperson for the commissioner, announced the pending investigation Tuesday afternoon in a statement.

Earlier in the day, Veterans Affairs Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn said he had requested the probe. Stoddart’s office refuted that.

“The Commissioner has advised Minister Blackburn’s office that her investigation into a complaint about the handling of one veteran’s personal information has raised concerns about the possibility of systemic privacy issues,” Lawton’s statement said.

“As a result, she had already decided to initiate an audit of the department’s privacy practices.”

At a news conference to announce new support for the families of severely injured soldiers, Blackburn said that he was “very concerned about what’s happening” at the department.

“This morning we have a discussion with the privacy commissioner and I thought with all that news is coming, that it would be appropriate for the commissioner, the privacy commissioner, to look further in the department to see what’s going on, to enlarge what she has done up to now, to look further into the department to be sure that what’s going on there,” the minister said.

The audit will begin after Stoddart finishes looking into a complaint by Sean Bruyea, a veteran and a blunt critic of the department. Bruyea has said that his medical and psychiatric records appeared in a 2006 briefing note to Greg Thompson, the former minister of Veterans Affairs.

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The UK’s Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has confirmed that legal firm ACS:Law – the victim of a distributed denial of service attack by Anonymous 4Chan users – is not able to use the attack as an excuse for its failure to protect personal information.

UK-based ACS:Law is one of several anti-piracy bodies – including Australia’s AFACT – that has been targeted in attacks by large numbers of Anonymous users.

ACS:Law documents exposed in the aftermath of the attack revealed the extent to which it had convinced alleged file-sharers in the UK into paying thousand dollar per allegation settlements to avoid litigation.

On Tuesday, Commissioner Graham confirmed his office would investigate the alleged data breach, which had exposed the details of tens of thousands of ACS:Law’s targets.

A new list was also leaked – a list which contained the personal details of 8,000 Sky Broadband subscribers that had been in ACS:Law’s possession, according to a BBC News report.

Graham told the BBC that the breach appeared to be “pretty serious” and that he could issue a fine of up to £500,000 (AU$817,000) under the UK’s Data Protection Act.

“The question we will be asking is: how secure was this information, how was it so easily accessed from outside?” said Graham.

Any claim by ACS:Law that it was a victim of a DDoS attack would not pass as an excuse for exposing people’s private details, he said.

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A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.

The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.

The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.

Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.

The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people’s activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don’t include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.

Selling the data is legal, but controversial, especially when it involves young people. Two companies identified by the Journal as selling teen data initially denied doing so. Only when shown evidence that they were offering data for sale—in one case, it was labeled “teeny boppers”—did they confirm it.

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BREA — An argument between a process server and a 17-year old boy is being investigated after the process server is alleged to have pointed a gun at the juvenile, police said.

Process servers typically deliver legal documents to individuals involved in court cases, Sgt. Bill Smyser said.

The argument took place 8:30 p.m. Saturday in the Hollydale Mobile Home Park on Carbon Canyon Road, when the agent was serving papers at a residence there, Smyser.

The process server, who was not a law enforcement official, pointed a handgun at the juvenile and then left. The juvenile called police, Symser said.

Police don’t yet know why the agent was serving papers at the location.

“Nobody is in custody at this point,” Smyser said. “They are working on it and trying to put the pieces together… I don’t know if the papers were ever served or whether he was trying to serve the owner.”

Contact the writer: lponsi@ocregister.com or 714-704-3730

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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s inspector general says the FBI gave inaccurate and misleading statements to Congress and the public about why an agent engaged in surveillance of an anti-war rally in 2002 in Pittsburgh.

Inspector General Glenn Fine says the FBI had no basis to expect that anyone of interest in a terrorism investigation would be present at the event sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center.

The FBI said otherwise in statements to Congress and in a press release.

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