Digital-age detective work can’t crack Brooklyn Bridge caper

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/digital-age-detective-work-cant-crack-brooklyn-bridge-caper/

by haomiao • 12 years ago

65 56 12 years ago

spindritf• 12 years ago

I'm gonna be honest, that's an impressive prank. And the faded flag is not just run-of-the-mill vandalism.

I'm guessing ride bikes to the bridge and leave cell phones at home? That's the only thing I can figure. They had to carry quite a bit of gear.

jakevoytko• 12 years ago

The Brooklyn Bridge has a few features that make it comparatively easy to pull off.

Here's a street view link that should give you an idea:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.705226,-73.995817,3a,90y,130...

- The bike+pedestrian path is suspended over the roadway.

- There are some suspension cables leading from the suspended pedestrian path, and trusses leading to the other cables.

- The cables are pretty thick and have railing-like cables, likely for maintenance.

- There is only a small metal door preventing people from running all the way up the cables. The railing-like cables look useful for climbing over the door.

It's possible that with the right skills, nothing is necessary but the new flag and tins, a plan, and a little luck.

katbyte• 12 years ago

And if the cables are anything like the suspension bridge ones I've been on they are extremely non-slip.

From what i can see looks like a very easy climb.

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Mt...

Video of the walkway and cables, if I'm not mistaken.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

Behind the scenes video of a movie shooting a walk up the cables.

Even with permits and DOT assistance, the SWAT team came out after them and halted traffic on the bridge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b4gVfJpUKU

wyager• 12 years ago

Really? Analyzing cell tower data over a harmless prank? They're probably mad that some pranksters conclusively demonstrated that, for all the security theater in NYC, the police can't even stop people from planting stuff on a major bridge.

beamatronic• 12 years ago

That is exactly it

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

Not probably, definitely. It was a tiny thing, but makes the entire country look foolish by calling into question the effectiveness of billions of dollars spent and a large part of world privacy stripped away. In that way, the white flags are an existential threat to a certain element, and something our grandchildren may be reading about in history class.

freshhawk• 12 years ago

If that's the motivation then this is the worst possible response. A ridiculous overreaction with a significant risk that after all this DNA/surveillance/facial recognition/manpower hubbub they don't catch them.

opendais• 12 years ago

If you embarrass powerful people, they will bring all of their power down on you like a ton of bricks if they can.

I just hope the pranksters don't end up in jail.

pyre2• 12 years ago

Well, the police could also "accidentally" think that they have weapons on them when they go to apprehend them... That would probably be worse.

s_q_b3• 12 years ago

It's highly symbolic from a police perspective. We may see it as some kids who watched too many documentaries playing a harmless prank. But let me rephrase that to put that in the frame of mind of the investigators. "Unknown individuals infiltrated a heavily guarded and highly visible piece of crucial infrastructure undetected. Once present, they defaced the public property by removing two American flags, and replacing them with white flags, a typical signal of surrender. The suspects remain at large."

It's about the symbolism, not the act. If NYC, for all its counterterrorism efforts, can't catch these pranksters, it makes the public safety officials look impotent in the face of real threats.

josho• 12 years ago

Your comment suggests that there is an expectation that police should have the ability to catch these guys. I find that ridiculous. Have you all really become that paranoid that a harmless prank needs to find justice because 'what if it was a terrorist'.

Listen folks, you can't stop terrorism. A determined attacker will just find an easier target. You can't guard everything all the time.

smutticus• 12 years ago

it makes the public safety officials look impotent in the face of real threats.

They largely are. It's incredibly difficult to stop crimes before they're committed, and prior to any terrorist mania it was generally considered to be outside the scope of police work. Mainly because it requires a security apparatus, and authority, that is in direct conflict with an open democratic society.

megablast• 12 years ago

Unknown individuals infiltrated a heavily guarded and highly visible piece of crucial infrastructure undetected.

100,000s of people do that every single day. It is a bridge. That is what bridges do. They carry largely unknown people across a highly visible structure.

I think you are blowing this out of proportion. Or maybe I shouldn't use the word blowing.

Terr_• 12 years ago

Wouldn't it be funny if they are the same flags, and instead the perpetrators bleached them "remotely"?

Like with a quad-copter hauling loads of liquid bleach, or a laser with the right wavelength to destroy the dyes.

Edit: Ah, never mind, the spotlights are also up on top, not down below as I had thought. It'd take quite a lot of robo-dexterity to cover them up so quickly, so if a person is already up there they might as well just swap the flag too.

rotten• 12 years ago

Or some nearby industrial plant belched a cloud of toxic bleaching gas that drifted by and as a side effect reacted with the cheap chinese dyes in the flags.

Corporate terrorism? It would never happen...

sylvinus• 12 years ago

That sounds straight up from the TV show "The Leftovers" in which there's a nihilist cult that paints things in white!

Someone1234• 12 years ago

while sparking terror fears in the process

That's just pathetic. You have to have a pretty addled mind in order to find an obvious prank such as this "terrifying."

But that's what our society is now, everything is measured by the lowest-common-denominator, and fear is a commodity sold to you every evening on the news.

yoodenvranx• 12 years ago

That's what I tought as well. Terror terror terror. Fear fear fear. It's getting ridiculous.

oh_sigh3• 12 years ago

I think the implication was that people were afraid of a terrorist attack during the act, not in retrospect when they saw it was just a white flag

pyre2• 12 years ago

That was my read as well. That 'people' were afraid it was a terrorist attack because the lights on a landmark went dark. On the other hand, why didn't people just assume it was a black-out, or technical issues?

superbaconman• 12 years ago

But was it a prank? That's the question that has everyone nervous. Because if not, it was art. Given the context of modern politics, officials don't want it to be art. Imagine this happened on 4 or 5 different land marks on the same day. Officials would be shitting themselves.

lotsofmangos5• 12 years ago

In Glasgow, this kind of thing does happen every day. At least to the Duke of Wellington.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

You know at this point I would be shocked and surprised if they don't invoke "terror fears" one every single incident. Someone forgets a bag in the park -- "terror fear". Someone runs a red light -- "terror fears". Defacing of a lamp post "terror fears". It is as if they don't get paid or if they don't mention it.

deciplex4• 12 years ago

If they don't say it's terrorism, how are they going to justify the 30-year maximum-security prison sentence they hand out to whatever group of kids carried out this totally harmless prank?

frogpelt• 12 years ago

If someone could do this without being caught what would stop someone else from doing something sinister and deadly? That's how I took it.

lotsofmangos5• 12 years ago

People have always been able to do sinister and deadly things. The reason that they do not happen more often is largely not because of people stopping them, but is rather because not many people are really that nuts.

The ability of pranksters to switch flags on a bridge does not make your world more risky. A heavy handed state triggering paranoid reactions from the mentally ill may well do.

sys32768• 12 years ago

I wish there were more discussion about why they did this rather than how.

igravious• 12 years ago

This is that discussion. Let's hear your thoughts.

Mine is that the pranksters want to expose the fear-mindset in general for what it is, and relatedly show that the freedoms we've given up in the name of security was a bad idea, and finally that security is an illusion because you can't secure all places at all times unless you want to live in something that resembles a prison.

kazinator• 12 years ago

Bingo. The white flags denote surrender: surrendering your rights to the state. I got that too!

In short, they say: "America: you're pwned, like this bridge, and, like the cops here, you don't even know how it happened".

frandroid2• 12 years ago

There was no statement, so we can all speculate, but that's it.

discardorama• 12 years ago

Reminds me of the MIT pranks http://hacks.mit.edu/

oh_sigh3• 12 years ago

They should spend the money on fixing the security holes, not finding the perps. If it really was a terror act, the terrorists wouldn't care if you found out who they were after the fact, so this isn't any kind of deterrence.

lotsofmangos5• 12 years ago

'Perps' in this context reminds me of the Dredd story "Un-American Graffiti".

If this all ends with someone trying to paint a smiley face on the Statue of Liberty, then I would not be in the least bit surprised.

lotsofmangos5• 12 years ago

This is hilarious and the official reaction only makes it more so.

If the NYPD want to discourage more pranks from occurring, this kind of overly dramatic sulking is not really the way to go about it.

dzhiurgis• 12 years ago

Aaaaand it's gone from the frontpage. The very symbol of hacking is gone from the Hacker News in less than 5 hours.

In regards the topic the flag turned into a symbol of surrendering of ones freedoms to the state.

Now let's spend hundreds of thousands to catch them, put them to the jail and budget for consultants who will help closing such threats in future.

dang• 12 years ago

Five hours is plenty of time on the front page, and the second page has good stuff too.

Neither the article nor the thread sheds much light on the story, so it doesn't seem surprising that this post didn't reach the top tier.

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

Given just how bad the economy still is, it pains me to see the NYPD wasting potentially tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, trying to find a bunch of kids who replaced a couple of flags. They should be rewarding these kids for finding a glaring security hole (if they find them) in supposedly one of the states heavily guarded monuments before someone with ill-intentions found it and caused havoc...

If they're calling this an act of terrorism, are they going to throw these kids into a jail cell for 20 years for a harmless prank? Whatever happened to being able to have a good old prank. Kind of reminds me of the MIT pranks: completely harmless.

How about they spend the money securing the bridge instead of combing through cell-phone towers and involving innocent civilians in a draconian dragnet operation? This kind of behaviour from the NYPD is just going to encourage more pranks like this.

suprgeek• 12 years ago

Rig up a couple of motion triggered IR camera's at critical points not commonly accessed, disguised and tamper proof. Check it once every so often just to make sure it works.

Next time some jokester tries a stunt like this go check, find their pic, locate & throw his/her dumbass in jail (if so desired).

And please stop with this "terrorist" scare mongering! We as a society (or the media portrayal) are becoming a bunch of paranoid jerks parroting this nonsense and wasting taxpayer funds when the NY cops have many more important issues to deal with.

deciplex4• 12 years ago

And please stop with this "terrorist" scare mongering! We as a society (or the media portrayal) are becoming a bunch of paranoid jerks parroting this nonsense and wasting taxpayer funds when the NY cops have many more important issues to deal with.

Yeah, I heard we're nearly at the point now where we're going to go around putting hidden motion-triggered cameras literally everywhere.

atbtoacb• 12 years ago

So I agree that it would be outrageous for to throw these folks in jail for this.

But it does seem worth following up on. Not because they did bad, but because it's important to learn how they did what they did. And demonstrating to potential terrorists that you're capable of finding people who breach security at landmarks seems like a good thing to do.

The Brooklyn Bridge would be a reasonable terrorist target. We collectively spend a lot of money to try to make it secure, just like we do with basically all large buildings. And that feels reasonable to me, and I imagine to a lot of other people. (e.g., I'm not sad some of my tax dollars go to protecting the Golden Gate Bridge[1])

And, so, I dunno, NYPD hasn't thrown 'em in jail yet, and they've only said "It is a matter of concern... I am not particularly happy about the event." So I guess I think it's a bit unfair or unhelpful to judge everyone's handling of it quite yet, everything seems sorta fine to me as of now.

Also what an awesome prank, I love it.

[1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Protecting-Our-National...

Digital-age detective work can’t crack Brooklyn Bridge caper

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