Hackers steal 5.6M fingerprint files: What can criminals do with the data?

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Cybercriminals stealing our biometric information is very unsettling. Passwords, credit cards and even Social Security numbers can be changed to guard against identify theft and fraud. Fingerprints, however, cannot. At least, not permanently. Perhaps the only silver lining to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s announcement last week that criminals had stolen 5.6 million fingerprint files, up from the 1.1 million files originally reported missing, is that it would be extremely difficult to use such biometric data to commit fraud or theft.

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The world is seeing less crime, so where have all of the burglars gone?

The number of violent crimes has fallen by 32% since 1990 across America as a whole.

The capital of Estonia, Tallinn, does not look like a den of thieves. On a summer afternoon, herds of elderly tourists—American, Japanese, British—wander between the gift shops and sip lagers at pavement cafés beneath the gothic town hall. In a park, teenagers chat and smoke cigarettes in the sun.

 

 

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The American prison system’s darkest period in history

Recent lawsuits and Justice Department investigations have uncovered grotesque abuses of mentally ill inmates at state and local prisons.

It has been an extraordinary three weeks , and maybe the darkest period in the history of the American penal system. In four states the systemic abuse and neglect of inmates, and especially mentally ill inmates, has been investigated, chronicled and disclosed in grim detail to the world by lawyers, government investigators and one federal judge. The conclusions are inescapable: In our zeal to dehumanize criminals we have allowed our prisons to become medieval places of unspeakable cruelty so far beyond constitutional norms that they are barely recognizable.

 

 

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NYPD forms new unit to track troublemakers on social media sites

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The NYPD has formed Facebook and Twitter units in order to track down and monitor criminals and criminal behavior on social media sites.

The New York Police Department has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

 

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World’s Largest Source of Spam Email Shut Down By Microsoft and U.S. Marshals

spam

The scale of the shut down is unprecedented.

The world’s most prolific source of spam emails has been shut down in a series of coordinated raids by Microsoft and US federal authorities.  The Rustock botnet, an international network of virus-infected computers, had for years generated billions of emails per day, promoting unlicensed online pharmacies and cut-price impotence pills.

Study: Future Criminals Could be Identified as Toddlers

Baby_behind_bars

Identifying youngsters at such an early age could be a cheap way of tackling a range of issues from drug abuse to prison overcrowding.

Tantrums and lack of self control in toddlers is a sign they may grow up to be drugs addicts and criminals, claims research. Badly behaved children as young as three are also the most prone to financial and health problems in adulthood.

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