Update (4/25): He made it up!
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Did you hear about the Berkely professor (Jasper Rine) whose laptop was stolen, and he warned the crook that the feds would be looking for him?
You can listen to the audio here and read the transcript here. The relevant portion:
You are in possession of data from a hundred million dollar trial, sponsored by the NIH, for which I’m a consultant. This involves some of the largest companies on the planet, the NIH investigates these things through the FBI, they have been notified about this problem.You are in possession of trade secrets from a Fortune 1000 biotech company, the largest one in the country, which I consult for. The Federal Trade Communication is very interested in this. Federal Marshals are the people who handle that.
You are in possession of proprietary data from a pre-public company planning an IPO. The Securities and Exchange Commission is very interested in this and I don’t even know what branch of law enforcement they use.
Your academic career is about to come to an end. You are facing very serious charges, with a probability of very serious time. At this point, there’s very little that anybody can do for you. One thing that you can do for yourself is to somehow prove that the integrity of the data which you possess has not been corrupted or copied.
I’m not a techie (euphemism for nerd), but the warning sounded scary to me. One of Michelle Malkin’s readers thinks the professor is bluffing:
Interesting speech from Professor Rine. And a total bluff. I…have extensive knowledge of data communications, radio communications, radio signal tracking, computer security, and so forth. There are several things that Professor Rine stated that demonstrate that his story is false.
Laptops are stolen all the time, but I didn’t realize laptop stealing at Berkeley was so newsworthy.
Note: Well, thanks for telling me about the typos. 
Don’t be shy. If you see a misspelled world word, please let me know pronto.
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That professor is certainly in big trouble.
I think this Berkely professor is not very bright. To carry so many secret and sensitive files in an unsecured laptop seems to me completly irresponsible.
He may be bluffing, but he is telling the truth. IF, and that’s a big IF, the feds decide to get involved in THIS laptop theft, then the consequences can be stiff.
One: Theft of confidential company business is a crime.
Two: The NIH study is government property. It is a crime.
This professor just made that laptop extremely valuable!
Proprietary theft has always been a problem. When drawings were made by hand they were always stamped with a Warning: of Proprietary information in violation of state law. Today however, it has become much more sophisticated, and in 1986 The Federal Economic Espionage Act, this is a felony punishable with a 10 Million dollar fine and 15 years in jail. Companies and the Federal Government take this kind of crime very seriously.
I would be inclined to believe the Professor is NOT bluffing since the act of 1986 there has been extensive improvements from company theft of proprietary information.
This hacker may think the professor is bluffing there are ways of tracking each pc which logs on to the system from there it is a question of time before the thief gets a visit from the FBI.
I agree with Michelle’s reader. The technical issues the professor mentions are BOGUS.
Unless that campus is configured to trianglate positions (and I’ve never seen a network outside secure, secure govt facilities that are), he’s FOS.
And the bit about Windows… yeah, right.
He may know genetics, but his IT knowledge comes from Hollywood thrillers.
The claim about Microsoft calling him when he loaded an identical copy of Windows is total BS
With the new registration process, when I reinstalled my O/S onto a new hard disk, it wouldn’t let me register the O/S. I had to call and explain why I was reinstalling the software on a “new” machine.
…I didn’t realize laptop stealing at Berkeley interested so newsworthy.
UC Berkeley has a secret contract requiring them to be in the MSM at least once a week. They didn’t have any moonbats protesting the war, or Bush, or ANWR, or SUVs this week, so they had to come up with some news as quick as they could.
Why get irate and cynical over a professor who stupidly lost a laptop? I’m praying for the poor man to find it and to find peace.
Time for all of us to stop making mountains out of molehills, as my grandmother used to say.
Well, even if the MS stuff and the tracking info are bogus (duh… of course he’s bluffing. How bright do you have to be to steal your Prof’s laptop to get the exam???), what he said about proprietary data and the NIH study is absolutely true. They don’t usually come after you, but the trade secret stuff can be considered to have a monetary value, and stealing could be considered grand theft among other things.
If they don’t have that data on a server somewhere, though, they’re pretty dumb.
As far as the laptop being unsecured, passwords can be pretty easy to get around if you know what you’re doing, and maybe a little about the person who uses the machine. Most people don’t use sophisticated security….
I just hope the professor gets his data back. There have been more than a few B movies that revolve around the absent minded professor losing important data to the naive bad guy. This sounds like it is directly from that plot line.
I watched this yesterday and wondered at the professor’s carelessness. If he’s got all those trade secrets laying around, shouldn’t he be a bit more careful? Sort of made me think of that violinist who left her $850,000 violin (irreplaceable at any cost) in her car while she went shopping and it was stolen.
I’m a grad student in Biophysics at Berkeley, and this is the first I’ve heard about this (although when one of the admin offices lost a computer with 100,000 people’s personal info I was bombarded with email). Chances are the data is backed up somewhere on campus, but the consulting stuff may not be. If they do indeed know that it was a student then this sort of scare tactic is perfectly legit. If I were an undergrad and the prof stood up there and laid that sort of info out, I don’t know if I would be rational enough to think it was worth trying to call his bluff. Unfortunately it looks like Berkeley noticed a few more than usual hits on their server with the clip and cut it before he gets to the harsh warning.
Mark La Roi: Yeah, you’re right. He was pretty damn stupid to tell everyone what was on the laptop .. that makes me think he may be bluffing. Perhaps he is hiding some sort of gay porn on it, heh.
1) Tracing a computer is possible, but it takes extra software and hardware to do it — not your average McDell laptop
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/27/uk_government_aims_to_track/
2) If he has classified information, he’s in violation of mixing personal, business (consulting/school) with classified data on one computer. Remember John Deutsch? Unless he’s a genius or high up in politics, a la Sandy Berger, he can very well lose his security clearance.
3) This prof is guilty of stupidity and making up stories to emphasize his importance.
Addendum,
the above “The Register” link was part of a long running series on computer theft. The articles I really had in mind were these:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/07/on_the_trail/
Tracking information from security software has allowed Devon Police to recover a stolen Tablet PC and make an arrest today.
[SNIP]
Although Eurotechnix quickly abandoned hope of recovering the machines, it was still able to make the machines unusable using a data deletion facility available through Computrace.
Shaw explains: “Our remote data deleting service is working well on some laptops that have turned up in Nigeria. We have contacted the users, as we can see their email address, and told them they are using a stolen laptop.
“Some respond and tell us where they bought them. Some do not so we delete the user area of their hard drive,” he adds. “It takes them about a week to recover from this and then we see their system on our screen again. As the Computrace tracking agent is still there we send the delete agent again. “They soon get fed up.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/06/text_message_alerts_planned/
The ‘APC Lapdog’ product is an attachment that fits into a notebook’s serial port. It is the brainchild of British outfit Secure PC, and will either send a text message to a designated mobile, set off an alarm, or – in an office – tip off the network administrator, if laptops are moved without permission
I think dude actually had his stash of granola bars in the laptop case.
Too funny Rafael.
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