CLEAR and AIRA were down on and off all week. Some of our older readers might not realize that there are coppers on this job who have never seen an Inventory Book, filled out a five-page carbon Arrest Report, or seen a Court Transmittal that wasn't filled out by a computer. Progress and all that. But when these systems go down, and they go down a lot, a lot of police work grinds to a halt. Street operations aren't affected too badly, but it's difficult to run plates, check names, process arrestees, etc.
Which makes us wonder about things like this:
Which makes us wonder about things like this:
- A coworker of mine says she had the displeasure of waiting for a bus downtown yesterday with a few of the smelly wannabe hippies of OC. Said they were gloating on how easy it was to shut down a bunch of computers at police stations and make the ones at city hall go haywire also. Said something along the lines of 'they haven't seen anything yet', which she interpreted as them already having done something bad.
We don't expect the Department to up and admit that their computer systems may have been compromised. But we'll say with all the different systems cobbled together along with unsecured portals in and out of the network, we wouldn't be surprised if a halfway decent hacker could cause no end to problems. These aren't the hippies of 1968. There are some brainiacs out there without jobs and an appetite for destruction.