BrickHouse Security Blog

Erin Andrews

It has finally been revealed that the original Erin Andrews‘ peephole video was not an inside job. The F.B.I. has discovered that a man named Michael David Barrett was responsible for the notorious video. He was arrested for taking the video and selling it online. Barrett also goes by the name “Mark Barrett” and used the email address “handsforyou@yahoo.com.” The person who officially filed the complaint on behalf of Erin Andrews was F.B.I. Special Agent Tanith Rogers. [...]

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The Empire State Building is just one of New York's landmarks located in Midtown Manhattan

After 9/11 there were many security measures implemented in New York City to ensure the safety of its citizens. From airports to local businesses, cameras and license plate scanners were scattered throughout the southern part of the city, effectively creating a technological safe-blanket around lower Manhattan. Now, Mayor Bloomberg has announced plans to increase surveillance over the areas between 30th and 60th Streets, from the Hudson to the East River.

The new expanded security network will work in the same way the old one did, with the cameras feeding data streams into a coordination center located at 55 Broadway for analysis.

Mayor Bloomberg stated “We cannot afford to be complacent,” while reminding people in the crowd that Midtown contains such historic landmarks as Grand Central Station, the Empire state building, and the United Nations buildings, all of which could be subject to terrorist attack. He then added “Do you really want to work in a building that doesn’t have security?”

All in all, the program will cost $24 million and the funds for this project will be provided from the Department of Homeland Security. The program is scheduled to begin next year with completion expected in 2011. The majority of New Yorkers should take heart knowing that the city is making great strides in trying to keep all of us safe.

(Via The New York Times)

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The Associated Press recently did a story about child locator devices where they interviewed a father who successfully used the BrickHouse Child Locator to locate his lost child during a family outing. The story also interviews BrickHouse Security’s CEO Todd Morris and asks him to weigh in on the subject of child locator devices. Read on for the full story. [...]

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Mike Spinney (Twitter @spinzo) from SixWeight.com sent us in a fantastic story about how he once helped catch a criminal accused of arson. Do you have stories where you played the hero and helped catch a crook? We’d love to hear them and publish them on the BrickHouse Security blog, so send them in!

Years ago I used to work for a security company in Portland, Maine (third shift mostly in the central station).  Our location included a back parking lot monitored by a beam-type motion detector and two cameras, including one with a remote tilt/pan control.  Working the third shift we’d see all kinds of shenanigans, mostly harmless, owing to the hidden nature of our lot.

One night the motion detector went off and we panned over to see a pedestrian.  Not unusual, and given that it was a quiet night, we panned along with him to see make sure he had no intention of making mischief.  He wandered into the next lot and stopped to pick something up, then seemed to loiter near a car.  Before long we could see something bright in the car and we could tell it was on fire. [...]

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A thief who has stolen close to $50,000 worth of maintenance tools from the Osceola County Schools’ maintenance facility has finally been caught on camera. The man had broken in several times over the past few months but he managed to avoid surveillance cameras on site. This has lead people to question whether or not it was an inside job.

“He does look like he’s familiar with the surroundings,” Lizasuain of the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office said. [...]

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A while back we talked about technologies designed to deal with laptop theft. Here is yet another way to keep your laptop safe by using a simple software application that can help stop a laptop theft in its tracks and also guarantee that your data is safe if it should ever be stolen. The software is called, LAlarm, and it utilizes audible alarm systems, data retrieval, and remote deletion technology to make sure that your laptop and its data remain safe and secure.

The protection begins with the software’s alarm system that notifies you whenever your laptop is taken outside a predetermined safe area, it also sounds an alarm when your laptop has been left alone for too long. As a bonus, LAlarm even helps you save battery life on your laptop by notifying you when your battery is close to depletion. It can also send an alert to a users cellphone notifying them whenever one of the alarms is triggered, effectively guaranteeing that a laptop owner remains in the know at all times. But probably the best feature that LAlarm has to offer is its data recovery and deletion. This feature allows a user to delete and recover information from a laptop that has been stolen. [...]

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In Brookline, Massachusetts, a woman was caught on tape stuffing $200 worth of puzzles into her bag at Eureka Puzzles. She later returned to the store and was immediately spotted when a store employee recognized her from the tape. However, when confronted, Mary Lane, 52, claim that she had never been in the store until that time and is denying the charges.

On the other hand, the video clearly showed a woman who strongly resembled Lane walking into the store shoving puzzles into her bag and then looking at the camera, bowing her head, removing her sunglasses and moving off the screen. Despite having the same bag as the culprit in the video, Miss Lane insists that it was not her. But unfortunately for her, when police searched her bag they found one of the stolen puzzles. Employees also recognized Lane as a customer who had previously ordered games for the store to put on display. Those games were stolen just a few days later. [...]

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