Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Big Momma Knows Best

Wish it was the Chinese equivalent of Big Brother I'm refering to, in this case it's a mother of six tracking down teenagers who toilet-papered her house, and mind you, she didn't even bother to use MySpace, instead :

"Base persuaded supermarket managers to tally daily toilet-paper buys for the week and a Stater Bros. manager said there was a run on bathroom tissue two days before her home was vandalized. At 7:30 p.m. Feb. 17, someone bought 144 rolls of toilet paper, cheese, dog food, flour and plastic forks, the same items found on her lawn and house. It was a cash transaction, making it difficult to trace the purchaser, but the store had video surveillance. The video showed four teenagers making the purchase, one of them wearing a Norco High School letterman's jacket with a name stitched across the back. The store's parking lot surveillance camera showed the truck they were using. Base then borrowed a Norco High yearbook and used online databases to get the name, phone numbers and addresses of the teens on the store tape."

One question remains though. If she managed to socially engineer the supermarket's staff to pass her transactions info, even a surveillance camera footage, I wonder where they were shopping from, and would her detective work findings hold in court given how they were obtained. What if they used a distributed shopping practice?

You may also find a previous post on Big Brother in the Restroom, a relevant one.

UPDATE: Great post at Angela Gunn's Tech_Space. Keep your friends close, your neighbors closer!

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