bkdelong

I have GOT to find a new title for this thread. It's getting ridiculous. Anyway, my 'TSCM friend' Jim Atkinson outed himself to Cryptome yesterday and gave them a bit more information about the pictures he took. Unfortunately, JYA aggregated all of Jim's pictures into composites so all of the EXIF metadata got lost in the process. It gives a little bit of insight as to how the pictures were taken - I wonder how many people in law enforcement are using EXIF and realize they can get a heck of a lot of information about an image on a Web site taken by some of the more recent digital cameras.

Here's sample EXIF data extracted from this original picture:

  2.10 
  2004-07-16T19:53:50 
  YCbCr 
  unknown 
  Flash did not fire 
  Hitachi 
  SH-G1000

From that, we know what camera he used - a Hitachi SH-G1000 Pocket PC Camera Phone - when the picture was taken, and some details about what the camera did or, in this case, did not do - fire off the flash. Normally you could extract a heck of a lot more from EXIF but for some reason the Hitachi doesn't record other camera information. Here's one from a friend's CanonPowerShot G3 and another from one of my Kodaks.

Today's Insecurity note from Jim sez:

Boston Medflight Helicopters to MGH will have normal operations during the DNC and they will have an extra helicopter in service during this time period.

Spaulding will not be accepting helo flights on their pad, and anything into Shriners will go to Beth Israel roof and then to ground to there. I would be most concerned about "MedFlight 2" as it holds a huge amount of fuel, and can fly at over 200 MPH (with 2,000 pounds of cargo), and has an extremely high operating ceiling. Also, the French made Dauphin II is a popular military model/variant and would most likely be the target if a terrorist was planning on snatching and using it as a flying bomb (easy to obtain flight training).

A 7300 pound helicopter, slamming into either the DNCC or nearby building at over 200 MPH would rip a huge hole in the building, plus the resulting fire due to the extended fuel capacity (350 gallons) and the lack of safe egress from the Fleet Center presents some interesting problems. There are no ground level exits from the Fleet Center, and the entire North Face of the building is exposed to incoming high speed air traffic so a hijacked/stolen helicopter attack would be devastating. The Fleet Center is quite literally "built on stilts", and an emergency evacuation is quite impossible.

The Fleet Center is perhaps one of the worse possible places in they could be having this convention.

OK - I don't think the terrorists would try all the stuff Jim has mentioned. I think what bugs me the worst about all this - besides the complete lack of media attention - is that I'm normally a person who chastizes the Bush administration and DHS for their paranoid tendancies. we hear SO MUCH about the security of the convention in Boston but this "series" shows that it's all lip service and eye candy. Over the next few days I'm going to float more of this to Boston-area media and see if anyone bites. This is getting ridiculous.

[BrainStream]
(Permanent link to this entry)