StrangerThanFriction::Blog

The first rule every lawyer will give you about dealing with the police is this: Don’t. Unless you’re the one making a report, you give the very least amount of information required by law, don’t volunteer anything and under no circumstances ever consent to a search. These aren’t guidelines for criminals – they’re really for everyone. The main reason is for this is that the police are trained to be suspicious and they handle enforcement, not justice. Their job is to make the arrests, the judicial system figures out who’s innocent and whose guilty. From that standpoint, there’s very little one can say to a police officer that will help and quite a bit that can hurt – even if you have absolutely nothing to hide.

As much as I hate to say it, that all seems to go out the window the moment two local cops come banging on your door at half an hour past midnight.

While I fully intended on being in bed an hour prior, wpa_supplicant on my laptop’s new OpenSUSE installation was being finicky and I was stubornly staying up trying to sort it out. There was a rapid pounding on my door which is rare in itself, but given the late hour I was doubly surprised. There’s no light outside my place, so when I flipped on the interior lights and saw two cops peering in at me it was quite a shock. I mean, to be fair, the Broadcom drivers I was installing on the laptop weren’t quite in line with their licensing agreement, but somehow I don’t think the DMCA and EULAs were at fault here.

Opening the door, I ask the officers what’s going on. One responds that they’d received a call about a loud bang and were checking it out, and did I drop anything, slam any doors, etc. It’s been completely quiet all night, and I tell him as much. He asks if there’s anyone else in the house – there isn’t. Then he asks if they can do a brief walk-through just to check (“make sure you didn’t kill your girlfriend or something” was the phrase I think he used).

This drops an awkward moment into the conversation. There’s the part of me who’s heard the warnings in that first paragraph repeated, by lawyers and law enforcement officers alike, enough times to be certain that allowing them in is effectively consenting to a search and there’s no way in hell I should do so. Another part says they’re responding to a possible shots fired call and it’s pretty reasonable to let them see there are no bodies lying about my place. I know the right answer is to politely decline, stating that my friends in law enforcement have told me never to consent to a search. But, I’ll be perfectly honest here, I was a little shaken. I have a clean record and haven’t exactly been busy trying to change that… Refusing a request which, on its face is totally reasonable, would raise a whole lot of undue suspicion and probably drag the whole thing out further. So, against my better judgement, I shrug and let them in.

I walked with them through each room. It’s a small place, so that didn’t take very long. The officer asks me if I own any firearms, I tell him that I do. He asks if there have been any accidental discharges and I respond that, no, they’re all locked up. He takes down my name, date of birth and phone number, says, “Have a good night” and they leave.

On the whole, it really wasn’t a big deal, but it just felt wrong. It’s strange – you think of yourself as a fairly clean-cut, well-established, upfront kind of guy. Then a couple of police officers come pounding on your door late at night asking questions and all of a sudden this weird paranoia kicks in: Why’d they stop at my place? Were they searching every house in the area? No, my lights were on and visible through the windows while all the other units around were dark. They probably picked the place(s) where people were apparently up. Well, was the shots fired call even real? I haven’t heard anything all night… (And here’s where hanging out with infosec people gets you) Was this a shakedown run – was the whole story just a way to get an LEO in my place without a warrant? What could they possibly be looking for?

Like I said, sudden paranoia. The reality is, I can’t think of a single rational reason why the whole thing was any more than it appeared to be. Random, a little unnerving, but business as usual.

Because I just let them traipse throug my place, though, perhaps a critical look through my house to see if there was anything which might look out of place and pique an officers’ curiosity. Bedroom: Nope. Overflowing laundry bin, pile of books, a bunch of personal crap on the nightstand… Including a pocket knife. Oh well. Not exactly an unusual thing among a boy’s personal effects. Book on the top of the pile is boldly titled “Gang Leader for a Day”. Hrm. Great. Whiteboard is covered with scrawled ToDos and schedules. Nothing there.

There’s very little in my kitchen and living room. The most sinister thing in there is the stereo. Woot! Model citizen.

Office. Uh-oh… Yeah, those steampunk projects are fun. I love crafting functional art. However, the sawed up buttstock to a WWII rifle, disassembled air-drill and various brass fittings all lined up and organized in the corner probably don’t scream “art” to a police officer.  Bookshelf full of books on computers, security, crypto and hacking… Again, maybe not so awesome. Shelf full of random tools and bits from various projects… Everyone has those, but in conjuction with my steampunk rifle bits, perhaps not so great. Worklights on tripods… Parabolic dish antenna… A metric ton of computer gear, including a number of blinky boxes I doubt my guests could readily identify. Two industrial mohawk headpeices (one with cold cathode tubes) flanking the DC16 Goon armband (tan cammo with a red G and raised red fists)… Yeah. Awesome. My sundry hobbies and affiliations make my home office look like the workshop of a budding Tim McVeigh.

I’m actually a little concerned about the rifle stock… It’s the kind of thing an officer will see and immediately think of a pistol-gripped, concealable rifle. In reality, I swapped the stock out for a synthetic a while ago since the lacquer on the wood bled like crazy, but I’d rather not be doing show and tell with the BATFE over it.

The one really, really good thing was that I haven’t started my latest photo project yet. I’ve been wanting to do a silly piece on conspiracy theories and the plan is to cover my office wall in papers – schematics of submarines, satellite photos of Tunguska, blown up candids of Ricky Martin and JFK, sheets of meaningless numbers highlighted at random… Just fill the wall with them. Totally silly lighthearted fun – unless you suddenly have a couple of police hanging out wondering what in the holy hell Ricky Martain is doing pinned to a Los Angeles class nuclear attack sub and why I’ve clearly invested so much time in it.

In the end, I don’t know what to think of all this. Mostly, I think I’m overthinking the hell out of it. Having spent so many years listening to Mitnick stories a certain paranoia around law enforcement isn’t really surprising. Still, I made a real mistake in allowing them in. It’s possible at this point that my little steampunk project is going to result in some questions down the road, and that’s not exactly a heartwarming prospect. Oh well, I guess we’ll see.

So much for getting to bed early…

Taken from James’ Twitter feed:

http://dilbert.com/2009-05-04/

This past weekend was a real trip to the past for me. About twelve years ago I found myself adrift – I was gong to college, but with only a very vague idea of what I wanted to do, and my living arrangement was strained at best. My father had accepted a very compelling job offer just as I was wrapping up high school and, being the ridiculously independent type, I’d decided to stay in LA. Even working full time and getting some support from my parents, I was chronically strapped for cash, living in the middle of nowhere because it was cheap and more or less floundering around for a sense of direction.

Through a college friend, Zorah, I managed to land my very first tech job, which was as a QA analyst for a gaming company. If that sounds in any way like a “cool job” the reader is advised to try it. Even good games are painful when you play them 40 hours a week, and we didn’t make particularly good games. But, the bright point was that I met some really good people, including a fellow tester named Bryan, a progammer named Zak and a very prim and proper exhibitionist who was my immediate boss. The black walls, exposed ceiling and hanging rice lanterns combined with ongoing Nerf wars and the recent release of Quake made the drugery of testing feel rather worth it.

Scanning forward a bit, Zorah was in the SCA – the Society for Creative Anachronism (geeks with swords and bad accents, if you prefer) – and she was also very cute. As a result, a lot of us ended up going with her to one event or another and falling in love with the society. Yes, it’s horribly nerdy. But, there is something really compelling about being out in the high desert at night, bonfires blazing, drummers hammering out a complex rythm while dancers move in the firelight and the day’s battles are recounted loudly over tankards of mead and ale. It’s a source of many great stories, and while I ultimately moved on I still think back on those events fondly.

Part of the reason for this, and the main point of the post is the people. It was at these wars, tourneys and practices that I met the group of people who would ultimately form Jabir. Jabir was something unique, as anyone who shared those days will attest. It was an uncanny blending of the right people at the right place at the right time. Most pedantically, Jabir was a house – a house that was to be inabbited by a few people who were fed up with their living arrangements and venting at a local fighter practice. In the end, there were five of us and a run-down 1960′s two story in the north San Fernando Valley which had apparently withstood the Northridge quake on luck alone.

Jabir the entity was a lot more than a simple rooming arrangement, though. There was a strong synergistic effect among us, and we spend an amazing number of nights that first year just hanging out and talking. We were also a rambunctious and creative lot. One night, we decided to have a Star Wars-themed party, so we dismantled the ten-foot satelite dish in the back yard, dug a hole in the yard and planted the dish so we had our own little death star. Somehow we got distracted, though, and never bothered with the party. We would shoot darts in the kitchen, angling our shots through an open door and (reasonably often) hitting board in the garage. When we ran out of darts, we used bolt cutters. When that got boring we’d strap people to roller chairs, armor them up with a steel helm and make them do battle. We decorated with severed doll limbs and cutout Leonardo DiCaprio heads. Our Christmas tree was the first large branch of the season to be ripped off a tree by wind, and we decorated it with chains, latex gloves, soda cans and suppositories. We dumped a hundred pounds of dry ice in the pool and then made Bryan swim across for his Logan’s Run-themed 30th birthday. We set a *lot* of things on fire, including one of the roommates. The local pizza shop owner was convinced the house was owned by a eccentric and preternaturally hungry doctor and the delivery guy simply got used to seeing medieval weapons, naked women and plumes of smoke when they showed up. They were the only people other than the Jehovah’s witnesses who ever, ever rang the doorbell – everyone else knew to just walk in.

Jabir was a fairly long-lived phenomenon. We threw some epic parties, had ongoing amusing bouts of drama and generally lived it up in true fraternity fashion for a good five years. After that, people started moving on – buying houses of their own, developing their careers, getting into serious relationships and the like. And, like all good things, it eventually drifted off.

Some of us kept in touch with some regularity, or continued to room together after the house of Jabir was sold and razed. Others I’ve lost touch with over the years.

Just last week, I reconnected with Bryan, who had filled the role of an elder brother to me through college. We hadn’t really talked in three or four years – he’s since bought a house, married a girl he’d met at Jabir back in the day and generally done very well. It just happened that this past weekend they were having a party and a few of the staple crew from those days was going to be there. Naturally, I went and had a fantastic time catching up with some of the people who were such fixtures of those crazy years. It really brought back a lot of the memories, and for a while that sense of fraternity came back as well.

It’s strange to write all this, as most of the people who are likely to read it either were part of that time and understand completely, or weren’t and probably won’t get a sense of it from my rambling descriptions. I guess that’s not really the point, anyway. If we’d had cheap video cameras back then it might have made for a good movie, but as it is I think Jabir will eternally live in the had-to-be-there files. But, nostalgia aside, it is remarkably satisfying to reconnect with people who shared those experiences. Life moves fast, and it seems like we often don’t have the time to keep up with people. If there’s any point to this whole wandering diatribe it’s this: Make time. People matter a lot more than the trivialities that rush us through our days. If you’ve lost track of important people, make time to find them. You’ll be glad you did.