[Corpora-List] Hacked email accounts

[John F. Sowa]

On 8/29/2011 9:37 AM, Krishnamurthy, Ramesh wrote:
> In 1991, I went to Buckingham Palace to receive a prize on behalf
> of Cobuild. Although I knew it was probably against regulations,
> I took photos of the inner courtyard, and a corridor with some
> extremely valuable paintings. At the cloakroom, I was asked to
> leave my raincoat and my briefcase (which now contained my camera).
> A few days later, I got the roll of film developed at a local chemists
> in Birmingham. The prints came back, but the final photo in the set
> was of the outer courtyard. Neither the negatives, nor the sheet
> of 'thumbnail' prints, contained any blank items... they had
> somehow been selectively deleted....

People constantly complain about bumbling governments that cannot
compete in technology with private enterprise.  Yet they somehow
attribute miraculous powers to those same governments.  Just think
of the number of miraculous steps that would be required in 1991:

  1. The amount of time, effort, personnel, and technology required
     to scan all items left in the cloakroom by all visitors, detect
     possibly suspicious contents, examine those contents, remove
     deeply hidden content, and reassemble the items in such a way
     that visitors would not suspect any tampering.

  2. Even today, there is no known technology that can scan an
     undeveloped roll of film, display all the contents without
     disturbing the emulsion, but somehow delete some content
     while retaining the rest.

  3. A more feasible method would be

     a) Remove the film from the cameras of some or all visitors.
        Then while they are visiting, develop the film and scan it
        for suspicious images.

     b) Use some photographic method to transfer a stream of just
        the innocent images to a fresh roll of film of exactly the
        same brand and type and place it back in the camera.

I'll admit that method #3 would be technically feasible, but only
at a very high cost and with very sophisticated technology and
highly competent and dedicated personnel working with high speed
and efficiency on items that are of minimal threat to the security
of the government or the royal family.

The inefficiency of the London police during the recent rioting is
typical of how how large bureaucracies (governmental or commercial)
work.  I suspect that a nervous photographer who thought "it was
probably against regulations" forgot to reset some latch or feature
of the camera that prevented the film from being properly exposed.

John

_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora