Tag Archives: crime

slot machines and pseudo-random numbers

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Russian hackers have been able to beat a certain brand of slot machine by buying old models, studying their coding, and figuring out the pattern of random numbers they generate. From Wired:

But as the “pseudo” in the name suggests, the numbers aren’t truly random. Because human beings create them using coded instructions, PRNGs can’t help but be a bit deterministic. (A true random number generator must be rooted in a phenomenon that is not manmade, such as radioactive decay.) PRNGs take an initial number, known as a seed, and then mash it together with various hidden and shifting inputs—the time from a machine’s internal clock, for example—in order to produce a result that appears impossible to forecast. But if hackers can identify the various ingredients in that mathematical stew, they can potentially predict a PRNG’s output. That process of reverse engineering becomes much easier, of course, when a hacker has physical access to a slot machine’s innards.

Knowing the secret arithmetic that a slot machine uses to create pseudorandom results isn’t enough to help hackers, though. That’s because the inputs for a PRNG vary depending on the temporal state of each machine. The seeds are different at different times, for example, as is the data culled from the internal clocks. So even if they understand how a machine’s PRNG functions, hackers would also have to analyze the machine’s gameplay to discern its pattern…

… the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

lead, crime and teen pregnancy

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Leaded gasoline peaked around the year I was born, and both crime and teen pregnancy peaked while I was a teenager. I managed to steer clear of these two things (or maybe I left no evidence in either case…), but maybe I would have been the next Einstein if it weren’t for lead, we’ll never know.

Lead Exposure and Behavior: Effects on Antisocial and Risky Behavior among Children and Adolescents Jessica Wolpaw Reyes NBER Working Paper No. 20366 August 2014

It is well known that exposure to lead has numerous adverse effects on behavior and development. Using data on two cohorts of children from the NLSY, this paper investigates the effect of early childhood lead exposure on behavior problems from childhood through early adulthood. I find large negative consequences of early childhood lead exposure, in the form of an unfolding series of adverse behavioral outcomes: behavior problems as a child, pregnancy and aggression as a teen, and criminal behavior as a young adult. At the levels of lead that were the norm in United States until the late 1980s, estimated elasticities of these behaviors with respect to lead range between 0.1 and 1.0.

Maybe we learned our lesson with lead and mercury and have moved on. Or maybe something as bad or worse is hiding in plain site in our consumer products and we just haven’t figured it out yet.

Just for the archives, here is a key 2000 study by Rick Nevin on the subject: How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy.

This study compares changes in children’s blood lead levels in the United States with subsequent changes in IQ, based on norm comparisons for the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) given to representative national samples of children in 1984 and 1992. The CogAT norm comparisons indicate shifts in IQ levels consistent with the blood lead to IQ relationship reported by an earlier study and population shifts in average blood lead for children under age 6 between 1976 and 1991. The CogAT norm comparisons also support studies indicating that the IQ to blood lead slope may increase at lower blood lead levels. Furthermore, long-term trends in population exposure to gasoline lead were found to be remarkably consistent with subsequent changes in violent crime and unwed pregnancy. Long-term trends in paint and gasoline lead exposure are also strongly associated with subsequent trends in murder rates going back to 1900. The Andings on violent crime and unwed pregnancy are consistent with published data describing the relationship between IQ and social behavior. The Andings with respect to violent crime are also consistent with studies indicating that children with higher bone lead tend to display more aggressive and delinquent behavior. This analysis demonstrates that widespread exposure to lead is likely to have profound implications for a wide array of socially undesirable outcomes.

Trump and organized crime

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Here’s a long article on BillMoyers.com, with links to a lot of other articles, about Donald Trump’s alleged mob links.

While there are some financial subjects on which the media has dared to grill the billionaire — ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last month got Trump to deliver a blunt “no” when he asked about the Republican nominee-apparent’s repeated refusal to release his recent tax returns, something every other recent presidential candidate has done — there has been remarkably little interest shown in some of Trump’s less-than-savory connections.

One of the exceptions is Johnston, who, over the course of 27 years, has had ample occasion to pay attention to Trump’s finances and mob ties. He was not the first investigative reporter to do so. In 1992, Johnston favorably reviewed the longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s highly unauthorized biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, which, in Johnston’s words, “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.” As Barrett said not long after Trump declared for the presidency last year, Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Barrett updates his treatment of Trump in a new digital edition calledTrump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention…

Beyond ABC News’ Ross, TV has been even less eager to press inquires about Trump’s history of relations with organized crime. Nor have questions of Trump’s mob ties been much explored in other major news outlets. A notable exception: Johnston, who, in Politico last month, raised yet more questions. One was why Trump relied on ready-mix reinforced concrete construction (mob-controlled) to build his eponymous Fifth Avenue tower and subsequent New York buildings, although steel girders were the usual choice. Another was why, when seeking a license to build casinos in Atlantic City, Trump received special treatment from New Jersey gaming investigators, “Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators,” Johnston wrote, “Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on.” Wayne Barrett calls Trump Tower “a monument to the mob.” He writes of the “sweetheart deals” that delivered the concrete, and the special tax abatements that have continued to roll in for Trump. There, so far as the public is concerned, the matter has rested. Why do the major media, ordinarily eager to fight for their own angles on big stories, lag? Why do the dogs not bark and the chambers not echo?

more on Alice Goffman

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Recently I was talking about how much I enjoyed On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. I knew there was some controversy over the book, but I didn’t realize how much. I actually assumed she was a journalist, but it turns out she is a sociologist and some sociologists think they are not supposed to write books like that. (Later though, the article says that journalists have criticized her and sociologists have defended her, so I am a little confused there.) I don’t think I know any sociologists, or a lot about them. Once I knew an anthropologist, and I asked him how he was different from a sociologist, but he just laughed and never answered my question. The problem, some say, is that she got too close to her subjects, was too quick to repeat everything they told her, and reinforced stereotypes. On the last, I think that is completely false. If anything, she does a lot to humanize and find redeeming qualities in people who do some risky and violent things. As for the way she got personally involved with her subjects, that is what makes the story so engaging. I think ultimately it is a story told from a certain point of view, and you have to keep that point of view in mind almost as though you were reading a novel. Whether that is good academic sociology or not I wouldn’t know, but I enjoyed the book.

By the way, Alice Goffman did a TED talk which is more or less a summary of the book.

Jeffrey Sachs vs. the CIA

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Jeffrey Sachs does not like the CIA.

The public has never really been told the true history of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Starting in 1979, the CIA mobilized, recruited, trained, and armed Sunni young men to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA recruited widely from Muslim populations (including in Europe) to form the Mujahideen, a multinational Sunni fighting force mobilized to oust the Soviet infidel from Afghanistan…

By promoting the core vision of a jihad to defend the lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) from outsiders, the CIA produced a hardened fighting force of thousands of young men displaced from their homes and stoked for battle. It is this initial fighting force – and the ideology that motivated it – that today still forms the basis of the Sunni jihadist insurgencies, including ISIS. While the jihadists’ original target was the Soviet Union, today the “infidel” includes the US, Europe (notably France and the United Kingdom), and Russia…

Blowback against the US began in 1990 with the first Gulf War, when the US created and expanded its military bases in the Dar al-Islam, most notably in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s founding and holiest sites. This expanded US military presence was anathema to the core jihadist ideology that the CIA had done so much to foster.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “violence is never the answer”. There are always bullies and thugs out there who will take advantage of you if they know you won’t defend yourself. But in the longer term, I think the answer to violence is always to find a way to de-escalate. People, particularly young men, need economic opportunity, and their legitimate grievances need to be identified and addressed. These are the root causes of most violence. After you figure out these two things, you can also think about how to alter any cultural norms that make violence seem okay, and limiting access to weapons. Finally, you can round up the remaining handful of hard core thugs and bullies if there are still some out there. All this is as true on the streets of an American city as it is in the Middle East. Note how both the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” have gone about this in exactly the reverse order from what I just suggested – start with a violent military or law enforcement approach targeting a whole class of people, go after the weapons, and blame the culture. All this is great for business if you are part of the military-industrial or police-court-prison-industrial complex. If we address the root causes – legitimate grievances and lack of economic opportunity – at all, we tend to give them the least attention and funding.

on the run

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This is by far the most interesting book I have read in a while. It’s interesting in a disturbing way – it’s hard to put down, and hard to stop thinking about after you put it down. I was already familiar with many of the facts, but what makes the book so engaging is how the author mixes the facts with narrative about real people, all from a first person perspective.

I got a much better sense from this of how young men can get entangled with the law in my own city. For the individuals in the book It started early – some got involved in the drug trade because their parents weren’t providing (fathers were absent in many cases, mothers were often hard working but sometimes affected by drug addiction or other problems) and/or because other jobs were hard to come by. Sometimes they were just with older kids who were involved in crimes, and they got charged as accessories. The first charge might be something like drug possession, driving without a license, receiving stolen property, or assault stemming from a playground fight. They were given a fine and put on probation. That made it even harder to get a job. If they fell behind on paying the fine, they could be arrested on some other minor charge, and this time they went to jail. If they had any kind of warrant, were on probation or parole, now they had an incentive to avoid the authorities at all costs. This could mean not getting a formal job, not going to hospitals, not applying for a drivers license or other government identification, not having housing or any assets in their own names. And of course, avoiding the police at all costs. Once they were avoiding the police at all costs, they could get taken advantage of by other more violent criminals, who knew they would not go to the police. Once they were taken advantage of, they could either do nothing, in which case it would happen again, or they could retaliate, in which case it could escalate and become more and more violent, ending in serious jail time for violent crimes or in death. And the handful of young men whose stories are told in the book are not unusual. Keeping track of all these warrants, fines, prisoners, probations and paroles becomes an enormous industry affecting not just a few violent criminals, but the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods. That leads to fathers who are absent and boys who are not provided for, and the cycle repeats.

guns in the U.S.

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Does the United States have a gun problem? There are facts and figures, and there are emotions. You are not a normal human being if you don’t react emotionally to certain kinds of events, and being in touch with these emotions can be a good guide to what you think is right and wrong. Then again, I believe any human being within the normal range can be trained to dig into the facts and evidence, draw appropriate conclusions and build their own personal mental model of the world. Once you have a sense of what you think is right and wrong, this is how you figure out what you think can and should be done about it. So, I’m going to quote from an article that caused a strong emotional reaction from me (warning, it’s probably upsetting to almost anyone but especially parents), and then I’ll go to some facts and figures that I find disturbing on an intellectual level, but also point toward some ideas about what can and should be done.

If you are not emotionally dead, you will be horrified by this stomach-churning New York  Times article about children who are killed accidentally by guns.

It had been a good day for Tristan. He had used the potty for the first time. He and his mother had danced a little jig. Down the hall, Tristan entered the bedroom where his father had been staying because of quarrels with his wife. She had chided her husband in the past for forgetting to safely store his .45-caliber handgun. But he had recently put a lock on his door to keep out his wife and children. He thought he had locked the door before going out to cut the grass.

The lock, though, had failed to catch. Tristan found the loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. He pointed it at his own forehead and pulled the trigger. Hearing the gunshot, Sergeant Underhill sprinted inside to find Tristan face down on the bed, the gun beneath him. When he called 911, the sergeant was screaming so hysterically that the dispatcher initially mistook him for a woman.

“My 2-year-old just shot himself in the head,” he said breathlessly. “He’s dead.”

There’s a picture of the kid alive and happy, which makes it infinitely worse. That’s one horrifying anecdote in this story. It goes on and on and on.

That’s the horror. Let’s turn to some cold facts and figures. Here’s a blog posting called “Deaths from assault over time in 40 relatively rich countries“. Other rich countries do not have the level of violence that we have in the United States. If you are the evidence-inclined type, have a look at the graphics and note that they are on a log scale. The United States has a rate of violent death 5-10 times higher than our close cultural cousins like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. And all these places have a little bit higher rates than most of Western Europe and Asia. The places with rates equal or higher than the United States are developing countries and/or countries with organized crime on a large scale.

So is the easy accessibility of firearms the cause of violence? I tend to think tough guy culture (one thing that is unmistakable in both articles is that men and boys are the ones shooting and being shot), a history of inequality and racial discrimination, and the so-called war on drugs are the real drivers. These are the policy levers we need to be working in the medium to longer term. But being awash in guns certainly makes the violence that does occur more deadly. Common sense gun control policies would certainly be great in the short term to treat the symptoms, as long as they are backed up by policies to treat the disease. But hard-core, violent law enforcement approaches to treat the symptoms may actually make the disease worse in the long term, which is probably what happened in the 80s and 90s that we are continuing to pay for today.

domestic terrorism

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Outgoing Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter said

“Domestic terrorism is international terrorism,” Nutter said. “There is really no level of distinction between the violence that goes on, on the streets of America on a daily basis and the episodic acts of international terrorism that also take place — primarily in cities…”

“Citizens around the world feel unsafe because of international terrorists … those same feelings exist for many in (American) communities,” Nutter said. “These criminals are terrorizing our citizens and that same level of fear of violence, the death of citizens, the destruction of property, are the same. In many cities across the United States of America on a weekend, you very well could have six, eight, 10 people shot.”

He called for a stronger relationship between federal and local officials to address American violence with the same sense of urgency and priority given to global terrorism.

Well, let’s think about how this is and isn’t true. There seem to be two ingredients that lead to violence, whether on an American street or in the Middle East. One is young men with something to be angry about, and time on their hands to do something about it. The second is a culture of violence that makes it okay to act on those angry impulses. I think you need both of these things. So to de-escalate, you need to understand and address peoples’ real grievances, keep them busy by providing economic opportunity, and gradually work on changing cultures than glorify violence.

If you just go by body count, gun violence in American cities is much worse. As Nutter pointed out, a body count of 200-300 per year from gun crime is typical in cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. Nationwide, the body count due to murder is 15,000 per year or so. But you can put that in the context of about 30,000 suicides and 30,000 deaths by motor vehicle. So that’s a lot of violent death. If you really wanted to prevent the most violent deaths, you would tackle some of these sources rather than international terrorism, or even the domestic crazies who occasionally gun down students, children, theater and church goers.

But there is the unexpected shock aspect to terrorism, whether international or just some nut in a theater. The gun violence and car crashes on our streets are so familiar they don’t shock us any more, even though they kill orders of magnitude more people every year even compared to 9/11. After 9/11 the United States started two wars of choice and spent over a trillion dollars. This seems to have escalated the violence rather than reducing it.

I’m not suggesting international terrorism doesn’t have to be dealt with. It has to be monitored and disrupted. There is the risk that an extremist group could get their hands on a nuclear or biological weapon, and then the body count would be shocking indeed and it could seriously disrupt nations and economies for a long time.

video camera coverage

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The police are making increasing use of video cameras – and not just public ones, but cameras on private property pointed in a public direction. When they want private footage, they just ask and most people are happy to turn it over. Some stats on Philadelphia from Philly.com:

This year, police have released more than 500 videos in crimes ranging from Halloween-decoration theft to shootings, throughout all six detective divisions – Northeast, Northwest, East, Central, South and Southwest.

As a result of those videos, police have made more than 100 arrests and have solved more than 200 crimes, Stanford said.

Police have access to about 4,000 video cameras across the city – in addition to city-owned cameras, SEPTA and Amtrak cameras and those at Philadelphia International and Northeast airports, Stanford said.

That adds up to more than 30 cameras per square mile in the city, from which police can readily obtain video – so it’s pretty tough to commit a crime anywhere and flee without being caught on video at some point…

Video is recovered in about 50 to 60 percent of homicide cases, he said. Based on a five-year average of 297 homicides a year in the city, detectives are obtaining video in roughly 150 to 180 homicide cases per year.

As a city dweller, it’s kind of hard to have a problem with this. City streets, and even underground walkways, aren’t nearly as dangerous as suburbanites think they are from sitting home watching CSI. But still, the more people feel that violent crime is being deterred, the more they will want to be out, and the safer we will all be. You wouldn’t want the police using video footage to get overzealous about minor infractions like jaywalking or open containers, or against political expression, but at least in Philadelphia there are no signs of that happening.