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Reposted from CBS12
HUTCHINSON ISLAND, Fla. (CBS12) — A man is behind bars after spending an unauthorized night at a museum on Hutchinson Island. The Martin County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) said employees at the Elliot Museum arrived at work on Friday morning to quite a surprise. The sheriff's office said employees discovered Port St. Lucie resident, 42-year-old Jason Allen Dark, was already inside the museum. However, he wasn't taking an early morning tour, he was taking items from the museum.MCSO said Dark was able to enter the museum through an unlocked door. When deputies searched his backpack, a handful of items were recovered, including a knife. The sheriff's office said Dark was taken to the Martin County Jail and charged with burglary and theft.
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Reposted from CISA
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) kicked off the 2023 Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month.
Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month is the agency’s annual effort focused on educating and engaging all levels of government, infrastructure owners and operators, and the American public about the vital role critical infrastructure plays in the nation’s security and why it is important to strengthen critical infrastructure security and resilience. This November, CISA is asking everyone to Resolve to be Resilient by preparing and investing in resilience today, so that, as a nation, we can recover quickly in the event of an incident tomorrow. We are highlighting practices critical infrastructure organizations can implement to recover rapidly in the aftermath of any significant disruption:
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently launched the new “Shields Ready” campaign to encourage the critical infrastructure community to focus on strengthening resilience. Resilience is the ability to prepare for, adapt to, withstand, and rapidly recover from disruptions caused by changing conditions. The new campaign was unveiled during a joint press conference at the Port of Long Beach alongside speakers from the Long Beach, California community and members of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Shields Ready complements CISA’s successful “Shields Up” campaign, which encourages critical infrastructure stakeholders to take specific, time-sensitive actions that reduce risk in response to specific threat intelligence during cyberattacks physical security threats, or natural disasters in response to specific threat intelligence. Shields Ready focuses more broadly and strategically on how to prepare critical infrastructure for a potential disruption and how to build more resilience into systems, facilities and processes by taking action before a crisis or incident even occurs. It also aligns with and complements FEMA’s Ready campaign. Each campaign webpage will feature and link to the other for easy reference and use. This focused approach highlights how critical infrastructure entities and other organizations can Resolve to be Resilient by integrating certain practices that will make themselves secure, resilient, and able to bounce back quickly and build back stronger from an incident, entities should:
This guide was created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to provide state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) emergency managers with foundational knowledge of cyber incidents to increase cyber preparedness efforts in their jurisdictions. Planning Considerations for Cyber Incidents: Guidance for Emergency Managers provides recommendations on how to plan for and respond to cyber incidents.
Key aspects of cyber incident preparedness included in the document are:
§ Understanding the types of cyber incidents likely to occur.
§ Engaging service owners and operators.
§ Identifying cyber dependent critical services and related dependencies.
§ Prioritizing and planning for service and system disruptions.
§ Identifying roles and responsibilities.
§ Providing integrated communication and public messaging; and
§ Developing a cyber incident response plan.
During November, CISA will support several 60-minute FEMA-led webinar sessions that will provide an overview of the final guide and supporting materials.
Reposted from Observer
A work of art has been stolen from your home, and your first question likely has a lot to do with who might help you get it back. The police? The FBI? Your insurance carrier? Interpol? The Art Loss Register? A private detective? The answer is that all of these entities may eventually be involved in a search and recovery effort, but the very first step is contacting the group least likely to be effective: the local police. A note of caution: there is a “very low recovery rate” for stolen artworks, according to William Fleischer, president of Bernard Fleischer & Sons, an insurance brokerage firm in New York City. On the positive side, he told Observer, “art theft does happen, but not as often as one would think. Most claims involve breakage and fire, with a sprinkling of lost items in transit.”
It’s a double-edged sword, in some respects. Your artworks are statistically unlikely to be stolen, which means that expertise in art recovery is relatively rare. Very few police officers have the knowledge or training to investigate stolen art, antiques and other collectibles, but having a police report is required for insurance claims or any involvement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI, which launched its National Stolen Art File app earlier this year, typically takes an interest only if the theft can be linked to organized crime, stolen artwork crosses state lines or a missing piece is worth more than $50,000. Local police departments “are not obligated to contact the FBI,” explains Robert Wittman, an art security consultant in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania who was formerly an FBI agent specializing in art theft cases. He added that it would be the FBI that contacts Interpol, the European organization that works with law enforcement agencies around the world to combat various types of crimes, including art theft.
However, the victims of art theft can contact the London-based Art Loss Register themselves to report missing artwork by submitting information like size, title, name of artist, price information and photographs. The Art Loss Register doesn’t pursue criminals but does maintain the world’s largest database of artworks reported stolen, and that database is regularly checked by collectors, art dealers, auction houses, insurance companies and law enforcement agencies when an object is offered up for sale. The Art Loss Register’s database was created in the 1970s by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), which is located in Manhattan. IFAR licenses its database to the ALR, but it continues to publish lists and images of stolen, recovered and looted art in each issue of its IFAR Journal and also organizes programs and publishes articles about art theft and looting. Wittman also recommended that victims of art theft should reach out to the galleries where artworks were purchased—particularly if a gallery specializes in that type of art or works by the artist. “They are likely to be aware if these kinds of pieces show up somewhere,” he explained. Still, don’t hold your breath. The police and the FBI have other, more consequential crimes to solve. “A month after contacting the police, you might want to reach out to an art detective,” Wittman said. “We do the stuff that the police won’t do.” What that ‘stuff’ is doesn’t sound very cloak-and-dagger. Private art detectives contact dealers and auction houses that sell the type of material that was stolen; they check lists of stolen cultural property; and then they wait for something to turn up. It likely comes as no surprise that Wittman’s principal business is helping homeowners and museums proactively secure their premises so that art theft doesn’t happen in the first place. Arthur Brand, a Dutch art crime investigator, noted that he is usually contacted by victims anywhere between two and forty years after a theft occurred, and one of the first steps he takes is to “ask permission from the police” to launch an investigation. “You don’t want to mess around with an active police investigation, so I take the job after it has gone cold,” he told Observer. Treating recovery work as a side gig seems to be the norm in the art theft world, and Brand’s case is no exception. He has tracked down stolen artworks by Van Gogh, Picasso and Salvador Dali, as well as culturally relevant objects, only getting a fee when a recovery is made. “In eighty percent of cases, I don’t get paid,” he revealed, adding that about half his work involves helping people buy and sell artworks—legitimately, of course.
There is no association of private art investigators, and victims of art theft often have to rely on search engine results to find someone who can help. The head of one New Paltz, New York, private investigation firm who asked not to be identified noted that “for a variety of reasons, law enforcement officers may be unable or reluctant to refer victims to service providers in the private sector,” although he thought that the NYPD or FBI might recommend contacting a retired detective or special agent who works in private practice. Additionally, lawyers who specialize in fine art matters “might be able to recommend an investigator.” Contrary to how Brand operates, private investigators generally work on a retainer basis, charging by the hour, and fees for billable hours and expenses rack up regardless of the outcome of an investigation. While most art is stolen from museums, rather than from private homes, private art collectors shouldn’t be complacent. In January of 2023, six people were arrested for the 2012 theft of a Porsche, several bottles of wine, designer wristwatches and artworks including paintings by Jasper Johns, Piet Mondrian, Frank Stella, Franz Kline and Philip Guston from the Los Angeles home of financier Jeffrey Gundlach the paintings were recovered in two weeks from an automobile stereo shop in Pasadena. Gundlach had offered a reward of up to $1.7 million for the return of his artworks, which proved helpful in tracking down the paintings.
Claire Marmion, an art consultant for the insurance industry and founder of the Haven Art Group, noted that both homeowners and insurance carriers offer rewards for the safe return of stolen artworks, although her experience is that rewards are “helpful in catching the perpetrators, less helpful in recovering the art.” In terms of whether or not to offer a reward, Steven Pincus, senior managing director of Risk Strategies, an insurance brokerage firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, suggested that “this should be guided by the insurance company in connection with law enforcement.” The amount of the reward generally reflects a percentage of the value of missing art but could be considerably higher if the piece has significant personal or sentimental value to its owner. The amount of insured loss is also a factor. In 2006, a 1778 painting by Francisco de Goya that was stolen from a fine art transporter van carrying it from a museum in Toledo, Ohio to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City was recovered, in no small part thanks to the $50,000 reward offered by the insurance company whose policy covered the artwork. A lawyer for the thief contacted authorities, who took possession of the unharmed artwork in time for its exhibition. As Arthur Brand said, “Money talks.”
Reposted from WHYY
Since January 2020, the Iron Hill Museum in Delaware has grappled with persistent vandalism. In the first week of October, the situation escalated when racial slurs were graffitied at the institution near Newark, prompting heightened security concerns. It’s the second incident of damage at the museum’s property this year. Back in March, small information signs were broken or went missing, trails were littered with trash, a storage shed was broken into, and cameras were stolen. Robin Broomall is president of the board of directors at the Delaware Academy of Science, which operates the museum. She said there’s a common thread across multiple incidents. “We’ve had ongoing vandalism for almost four years now. We really feel that it is the same person or persons doing this because their modus operandi always seems to be about the same: cause as much damage to the organization as they can,” Broomall said. “We’ve seen how they operate [by] throwing things around in the woods, damaging information signs. It always seems to be just about the same way.” At the beginning of this year, the museum used a $25,000 grant to create a new trail dedicated to the history of the free Black community in the area — but once again, it was vandalized. “In February of this past year, we had an African American History Trail put in with about 15 informational signs, and the ribbon cutting ceremony for that was at the end of February,” she said. “Less than two weeks later, every one of those informational signs was ripped out of the ground, broken, or totally destroyed.” Following the trail incident, the museum upgraded its security cameras, but they were unsuccessful in capturing the person responsible for the most recent act of vandalism.
This time, vandalism involved racial graffiti slurs across ten different informational signs. “We had ten education informational signs across our property that were all scribbled with black marker and the n-word was large and prevalent over all of those signs,” she said. “This is kind of taking things to a more disgusting level.” All of this occurred on the night of Oct. 4. Broomall was meeting with a security installer when she discovered the multiple racial slurs. “It’s also disheartening. I myself have had a lot of time spent on you know, helping to clean up. We have a volunteer who went around and spent almost an entire day working on cleaning off these signs,” she said, adding that was time wasted which could have been used for community engagement and programming. Iron Hill has been in close collaboration with local and state NAACP organizations since the March vandalism. They hold monthly meetings dedicated to finding ways to protect the museum and its African American history, with the active participation of state and local police. After hearing of the latest incident, Broomall said one NAACP member “was most adamant that they want to be involved in developing a ‘friends of Iron Hill Museum organization’ to pull some other community members into it.” While museum supporters could easily label the vandalism a hate crime, Broomall stressed the need to confirm who is damaging their property and what their objective is. She said the years of vandalism might be more about a vendetta against the museum than racial resentment.
Regardless of the motivation, Broomall said the museum will not be deterred. “I want to say that we are not going to be dismayed. We’re not going to hold back any longer with our purpose of educating the community on the history of the Iron Hill region,” she said. “We’re moving forward. We are going to be putting that African American History Trail back into place. We’re not going to let one individual hold us from doing what our mission says.” This summer, Iron Hill received a grant from the State of Delaware. That money will help pay to upgrade the security system, rebuild the African American trail, and replace a damaged fence.
Reposted from NL Times
Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima were forced to quickly get to their car after encountering an angry crowd of demonstrators on Friday during a visit to a museum for the history of slavery in Cape Town, South Africa. The atmosphere was grim, where the demonstrators left little room for the couple, and the security guards had to intervene forcefully. The couple managed to leave for their next appearance without injury.
The group of people gathered at the Iziko Slave Lodge to draw attention to the role of the Netherlands in South Africa’s historical ties to slavery. Dozens of protesters descended on the couple as they exited the museum. Along the way, a native bow was placed in the king’s hands.
A tricky moment came when Máxima had to walk around the car to her side. The Dutch and South African security guards had to push the protesters aside at that moment. The queen was then pulled through the crowd by security guards.
The atmosphere was initially friendly, but that gradually changed. The demonstrators were identified as being Khoisan, the indigenous people of South Africa. In addition to Willem-Alexander’s apologies for the Dutch past history of slavery, they also want to see action, they said. At the beginning of the visit, the couple spoke with the demonstrators outside when there were only a few of them.
The royal couple spent quite some speaking with those present. The atmosphere was positive at that moment; people spoke with each other seriously, but also laughed together. The demonstrators wanted to know from the royal couple when action will be taken, now that an apology has been issued. After the conversation, the royal couple invited some of the demonstrators to join them when they entered the museum.
But outside, the crowd soon swelled to over a hundred, many of whom expressed anger in front of the doors of the slavery museum. As a precaution, the gates to the museum were closed. The security guards stationed at the doors were booed, especially the guards who are South African.
The demonstrators questioned how the guards could put on a nice suit and “join” the Dutch. A museum employee tried to calm the situation, saying that the royal couple learned more about “the terrible history” inside, but the fuss only grew.
Protest signs were waved, and people also sang songs. The signs contained texts, like, “You are stealing our culture,” “We were the first,” “We want compensation,” and “You are forgetting us.”
On July 1, the king apologized on behalf of the Netherlands for the Dutch history of slavery during a speech in Amsterdam. “Today I stand before you. Today, as your King and as a member of the government, I make this apology myself. And I feel the weight of the words in my heart and my soul,” Willem-Alexander said during Keti Koti, the national commemoration for the end of slavery.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a press statement on Thursday that he acknowledges the king’s apology. “This was an important step towards reconciliation, repair and healing of old wounds.
Reposted from NYtimes
The Berlin institution with a spectacular, but disputed, centerpiece closes next week for a refurbishment that won’t be complete until 2037.Even wrapped in plastic, the Pergamon Altar is a striking sight. A monumental structure with ornate friezes depicting a battle between giants and gods, it was sculpted in what is now Turkey in the 2nd century B.C. and is one of the most imposing known examples of antique art. Housed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum for over a century, the altar has long been one of the main attractions in the German capital. That is, when visitors can see it. The altar has been inaccessible since 2014, amid construction work on the museum’s north wing. On Oct. 23, the rest of the museum — one of the most visited in Germany — will close for four years. Although the altar room and north wing are set to reopen in 2027, other parts of the building will not be accessible for a further decade. The project comes at a delicate time. In recent years, European institutions exhibiting archaeological objects from other parts of the world, such as the Pergamon Museum, and the British Museum, in Londonhave faced increased scrutiny over the provenance of their exhibits. With more than $1.5 billion of public money being invested into the Pergamon Museum refurbishment, its leaders now face new calls to justify their work. “The institution of the museum, as a product of the Enlightenment, is being questioned,” Andreas Scholl, the director of the Pergamon’s antiquities collection said during a recent tour of the site. “Nobody knows how the debate will progress.” The Pergamon Museum’s administrators, however, are betting that much will remain the same in the next 14 years. In addition to structural work, the renovations will add new spaces for exhibits and visitors, and update infrastructure, lighting and climate control. But, as Scholl put it, “The fundamental concept isn’t changing.” “The institution of the museum, as a product of the Enlightenment, is being questioned,” said Andreas Scholl, the head of the Pergamon Museum’s antiquities collection.Credit...Lena Mucha for The New York Times Opened in 1930 on Museum Island, in central Berlin, the building was custom-designed to showcase the altar and several other spectacular items of antique architecture, including parts of the so-called Ishtar Gate from the ancient city of BabylonBut the building was built on oak pylons driven into unstable, sandy ground, and Jens Küchler, the project manager in charge of the renovations, said renewing its foundations was crucial for long-term stability. The work, he said, is partly focused on a metal underground structure stretching across the island that “holds up the building.” The Pergamon Altar has always been the museum’s most prized attraction. Discovered in the 1870s by Carl Humann, a German engineer, its transfer to Berlin was made possible by a series of agreements between Ottoman Empire administrators and German officials that allowed Germany to retain a portion of the artifacts that Humann and his collaborators discovered.
Reposted from Ekathimerini
Five people on Crete are facing charges related to making up to €6 million by selling forged art works, attributed to well-known artists, to private individuals, collectors and auction houses overseas, following an investigation by police. The investigation of the five followed an incident in Sofia, Bulgaria, in February when authorities prevented the sale of a fake painting for €12 million. In searches that followed in houses and a warehouse in Attica, 10 paintings, seals, documents, certificates of authenticity and a metal oven for aging art works were found and confiscated. Experts deemed the paintings found in Attica to be entirely forged. The subsequent investigation found that the gang selling the paintings had been operational since at least 2014. The alleged members of the forgery gang range in age from 35 to 69 years.
Reposted from BBC
Staff at the Royal Lancers & Nottinghamshire Yeomanry Museum noticed a number of items were missing when they arrived at work on Sunday. A search then revealed a hole had been drilled up through an archway to allow the thieves to reach into a display cabinet. Detectives described the raid as "audacious" and "well organized". Among the items stolen from the museum, in Thoresby Park near Ollerton, are a distinctive parcel and gilt rosewater dish - said to be the sister piece to the Wimbledon women's singles trophy.
The Hurlingham Grand Military Polo trophy, statuettes of mounted soldiers and a cavalry trumpet were also taken. Nottinghamshire Police believe the burglary happened between 02:40 and 03:30 GMT on Sunday. Officers believe a small hole was drilled so a camera could be used to survey the display before a larger 25cm (10in) by 30cm (12in) hole was cut through the wooden floor and cabinet.
Museum curator Steve Cox said: "It's disgusting that they've taken history from the people who have served and fought for this country. "The items they have taken are priceless to the museum. How do you put a value on history? "We're upset about it, but we're fighting back and we're going to rebuild from what's gone." Det Insp Luke Todd, of Nottinghamshire Police, said: "This was an audacious, planned, and targeted attack on what is a wonderful historic building and was clearly very well organised. "The items that were stolen are not only high in monetary value but also high in sentimental value not only to the military, but also to the wider community in the area. "These items are worth so much more to the museum than they are melted down in their silver form." He urged anyone with information about the theft, or who becomes aware of attempts to sell the antiques, to contact police. The museum, which also contains a range of firearms and other weapons, has checked its collection and accounted for all other items.
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