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Reposted from Artnet News
Police raided an internet café and a private residence in Berlin last week as part of a high-profile investigation into a notorious jewelry heist in Dresden last year. The antique diamonds, deemed “priceless” due to their cultural significance, were taken from the city’s Green Vault in an audacious heist on November 25, and there have been few public developments in the case in the nine months since.
Dresden’s public prosecutor’s office ordered the raids on two residential and commercial premises in Berlin on September 2. Seven investigators from the “Epaulette” special commission—named after some of the stolen diamonds—searched an apartment and an internet café with support from three officers working in Berlin’s art crime squad and a hundred riot police.
The raids were carried out in connection with a man who has been selling mobile phone SIM cards registered with fictional personal information. Investigators suspect that the man, who has yet to be named publicly, either sold several SIM cards to the thieves directly or provided them to the internet café on Hermannstrasse in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood. The criminals communicated through the SIM cards to plan and carry out the heist.
The prosecutor’s office tells Artnet News that there are no new suspects in the case, and that the SIM card salesman has not yet been listed as a suspect as it is unclear whether he knew how the SIM cards would be used.
Potential evidence including business documents, cell phones, and storage devices were confiscated during the searches, but the prosecutor’s office declined to share further developments in the case before this evidence has been carefully assessed.
“The prosecutor is still confident to find the suspects and to bring them to justice,” a spokesman for the Dresden office tells Artnet News. “The prosecutor is also confident to be able to recover the stolen jewelry.”
The investigation is ongoing with few hot leads since last November, when a group of intruders broke into the Green Vault, one of the largest collections of Baroque treasures in Europe, through a small window. They smashed the glass vitrines and made off with 10 pieces of diamond-encrusted jewelry that were so priceless they could not be insured. Officials are offering a €500,000 ($571,517) reward for information that leads to the recovery of the stolen items.
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Reposted from Info-Security Magazine
Cybercrime is growing at an “alarming pace” as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and is expected to accelerate even further, a new report from INTERPOL has found.
It revealed the extent to which cyber-criminals are taking advantage of the increasing reliance on digital technology over recent months. This includes the rapid shift to home working undertaken by many organizations, which has involved the deployment of remote systems and networks, often insecurely.
Based on feedback from member countries, INTERPOL said that during the COVID-19 period, there has been a particularly large increase in malicious domains (22%), malware/ransomware (36%), phishing scams/fraud (59%) and fake news (14%).
Threat actors have revised their usual online scams and phishing schemes so that they are COVID-themed, playing on people’s economic and health fears.
The report also found that cyber-criminals have significantly shifted their targets away from individuals and small businesses to major corporations, governments and critical infrastructure.
Jürgen Stock, INTERPOL secretary general, said: “Cyber-criminals are developing and boosting their attacks at an alarming pace, exploiting the fear and uncertainty caused by the unstable social and economic situation created by COVID-19.
“The increased online dependency for people around the world is also creating new opportunities, with many businesses and individuals not ensuring their cyber-defenses are up-to-date.”
The study added that “a further increase in cybercrime is highly likely in the future.” This is primarily due to vulnerabilities related to remote working, a continued focus on COVID-themed online scams and, if and when a vaccination becomes available, another spike in phishing related to medical products.
Responding to the findings, Brian Honan, CEO of BH Consulting, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic is providing criminals with many opportunities as outlined in the INTERPOL report. Indeed, many organizations may be at increased risk of ransomware attacks due to having opened up remote access solutions, such as VPNS, to support remote working.
“These remote access points may not be properly configured and secured or, due to IT teams operating remotely, may not have the latest patches installed. In addition, staff may have had to use their own personal devices from home to work remotely which in turn poses challenges from a security point of view with regards to how to ensure those devices are secure.”
Jonathan Miles, head of strategic intelligence and security research at Mimecast, added: “It is important that organizations migrate away from a ‘keeping the lights on’ mentality and prioritize cybersecurity, especially at a time when threats aimed at a dispersed workforce are increasing. Failing to do so can lead to issues such as organizational downtime, data loss and a negative impact on employee productivity.”
Reposted from State of the Planet, Columbia University
With the peak of the hurricane season coming up and COVID-19 abundant in many hurricane-prone areas, the United States is poised to experience the collision of two major disasters. According to a study by scientists at Columbia University and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a large-scale hurricane evacuation would increase COVID-19 cases in both evacuees’ origin and destination counties. But directing evacuees to counties with low COVID-19 transmission rates rather than allowing evacuations to follow historical patterns would minimize the increase, according to the study.
The research is the first to quantify how hurricane evacuation may affect the number and spatial distribution of COVID-19 cases in the United States. It is awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal, but is posted on the medRxiv preprint server for health sciences.
“Directing evacuees to destinations with low virus activity and providing housing opportunities and resources that help maintain social distancing, encourage mask usage, and limiting opportunities for virus transmission will be essential,” said senior author Jeffrey Shaman, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Earth Institute, and director of the university’s Climate and Health Program.
“Many of the country’s most hurricane-prone states have recently experienced some of the highest COVID-19 growth rates in the nation,” said coauthor Kristy Dahl, a senior climate scientist at UCS. “In every scenario we analyzed, hurricane evacuations cause an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. Minimizing that increase depends on getting people to destinations with low virus transmission rates and ensuring that those transmission rates stay low even when there’s an influx of evacuees.”
The researchers built a hypothetical evacuation scenario in which residents of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe counties fled a Category 3 hurricane. Based on previous studies of evacuation compliance and behavior, the study assumed 2.3 million people would leave the four counties. Post-Hurricane Irma surveys were used to simulate where they would go. That information was then used in a national county-scale model of COVID-19 transmission to determine how many cases would result from the evacuations and where they would occur.
The study assumed that COVID-19 transmission rates in destination counties increased during the evacuation period not at all or by 10 percent or 20 percent, representing the levels of public health directives that were put in place in the counties and how well they were followed, as well as whether evacuees stayed with friends or family members, or in hotels or shelters.
Under the worst-case scenario the authors considered, if people followed historic evacuation patterns and virus transmission rates increased by 20 percent in their destination counties, there would be roughly 61,000 additional COVID-19 cases in the origin and destination counties combined.
Under the best-case scenario, if people instead evacuated to communities with low COVID-19 transmission rates and transmission rates did not increase in the destination counties, there could be as few as 9,100 additional cases resulting from the evacuation.
The scientists said they hope the study will help inform the work of emergency managers and other local decision makers, as well as federal and state agency staff as the hurricane season progresses.
Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance
"In Colorado, there's no shirt, no shoes, no mask, no service," said Colorado Gov. Jared Polis when announcing the state's recent face mask order, designed to decrease coronavirus transmission.*
Most people will comply with the mandate for health and safety reasons, in order to combat Colorado's coronavirus cases. In fact, a July poll found that 95% of adults reported wearing a face mask in a public space over the past month, a sharp increase from the half who said so in April.
But what if your employees encounter people not wearing masks in the course of their work, especially as the heat rises?
Visiting someone's house can be disconcerting, as you don't know the extent of that person's commitment to hygiene and social distancing. Whether you're there to fix a leaky pipe or act as a caregiver, you could be risking your health if your client isn’t doing his or her part to prioritize worker safety.
There have been a number of outbreaks of coronavirus on Colorado construction sites, and in at least one incident, it is believed inconsistent mask wearing caused the spread among workers. "They were working in an enclosed space, and we all get complacent," said Carrie Godes, a public health specialist at Garfield County Public Health, in an article in the Colorado Sun. "It's a good takeaway lesson for all of us in our work environment."
We've all seen the videos and heard the stories of customers’ outright refusals to wear a mask, and sometimes even threatening employees who ask them to comply. There's never a reason to sacrifice your safety and some customers may even have a medical exemption, but commonsense appeals should work with most visitors.
*Regulations vary by state. Yours may be different.
Reposted from Courthouse News
Thieves have stolen the painting “Two Laughing Boys” by Dutch golden age artist Frans Hals from a museum in the Netherlands, the third time it has been taken, police said Thursday.
The canvas by the 17th century master was taken during a burglary at the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum in Leerdam in the early hours of Wednesday, they said.
The painting, featuring two laughing boys with a mug of beer, was previously stolen from the same museum in 2011 and 1988, being recovered after six months and three years respectively.
Dutch police said in a statement that officers rushed to the museum in the town 40 miles south of Amsterdam after the alarm went off around 3:30 a.m. but they failed to find the suspects.
“After the manager of the museum was able to provide access to the building, it turned out that the back door had been forced and one painting had been stolen, ‘Two Laughing Boys,’” the statement said.
Police said they had started an “extensive investigation” involving forensic investigators and art theft experts. They were checking cameras and talking to witnesses and local residents, they added.
Frans Hals was a contemporary of fellow masters Rembrandt and Vermeer during the Dutch Golden Age, a flowering of trade, colonialism and art in the Netherlands roughly spanning the 17th century.
He is best known for works including “The Laughing Cavalier”, which hangs in the Wallace Collection in London, and “The Gypsy Girl,” now housed in the Louvre in Paris.
Dutch art detective Arthur Brand — dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the art world” after tracking down a series of stolen works — tweeted that “the hunt is on” for the “very important and precious painting by Frans Hals.”
Brand said the “Two Laughing Boys,” an officially designated piece of Dutch national heritage, had been stolen on the anniversary of Hals’ death in 1666.
In March burglars stole the Vincent van Gogh painting “Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” from another Dutch museum that was closed for coronavirus measures, on what would have been the painter’s 167th birthday.
Brand said in June that he had received two recent photos of the van Gogh as “proof of life.”
Reposted from Security Management Magazine
Earth has been ravaged and disrupted for millions of years by natural disasters, plagues, and other challenges to our ecosystems. The dinosaurs were able to survive for 66 million years until they finally met a (big) force they could not adapt to. Humans have been able to survive similar types of challenges to our ecosystem over the past 300,000 years, with similar successes. We have shifted, adjusted, and adapted to nearly everything which has been thrown at us. Now our species has been challenged yet again, prompting us to think about the way we not only survive, but live, work, and, one day, thrive again.
In an increasingly distributed and virtual world, trust and culture may not be so easy to establish. Leadership and management models we have been using successfully for the past 20 to 50 years may no longer be the best options. Strategic objectives may no longer align with our purpose, or that of our societies.
The way we communicate, share information, and learn is evolving as well. Research from all corners of the world is revealing that thinking is changing in more ways than one, due to both necessity and a realization that the extreme challenges also present opportunities to do things better.
In essence, we are at a major inflection point, which affords us the chance to reroute our connections. This includes how we lead in any industry or endeavor, and for us, this has implications for safety and security. This holds true for organizations, entrepreneurs, and consultants, which brings us to four new principles for leaders:
We all understand that trust and culture do not happen by accident and are traditionally steadily established over time, and with intent, from the very beginning of the engagement. The unfortunate (or fortunate?) fact is that in today’s dizzying pace of personal and business interactions, we often do not have that luxury.
We may be part of a short-term virtual or project team in order to solve a complex problem or issue. To do this collectively, we must build this trust and culture first, but quickly. Understanding the time-limited opportunity to break down and solve the issue, work aggressively at the very beginning to establish frequent communication via online mediums such as video conferencing, and encourage your team to be open and honest, feedback (and feedforward) information to one another, debate divergent views, and resolve internal conflicts simultaneously, ultimately solving the problem or issue they have been brought together to deliver a solution for.
Do you really require an hour and a half of everyone’s time at every meeting, every day, to discuss, brainstorm, drill down, and map solutions? Or would it be more effective to cut that in half (at most) a few times per week, with a focused agenda, and allow team members to think, plan, and prepare to execute between those times?
Productivity and value studies indicate that people generally perform better and produce greater results from working in sprint cycles, rather than over longer periods. The human brain has a short attention span, and higher-level thinking drops off very quickly when capacity is reached.
Design your team’s schedule—where possible—to allow for this flexibility based on individual context and environment, while balanced with overall mission and collective goals. What sets the new era apart is that we must learn how to be effective virtual leaders as well.
Competition has been the foundation of business and success for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So has collaboration. Our ancestor hunter-gatherers would not have survived had they not teamed collaboratively to find and track food, and neither would have many animal species. However, sometime around the dawn of the industrial revolution, individuals and organizations shifted to a competition mind-set to get ahead of their peers and win market share, either through providing valuable services or products.
In the networked and interdependent nature of today’s social and business worlds, this is no longer an advantage, but a crutch. Innovation, creativity, and critical thinking are key to problem solving, and this process is much more efficient via interconnected, interdisciplinary teams with professionals of complementary knowledge and skills. Working with one another in this context, rather than competing, is a win–win for both.
A majority of people are either good at dealing with technical details, via protocols, procedures, processes, or systems, or are adept at soft skills such as communications, empathy, self-awareness, self-regulation, and other social skills (collectively often referred to as emotional intelligence). It is fairly easy to find professionals who possess one or the other, but much rarer—and more valuable—to find someone who possesses nearly equal measures of both. Do we design our systems, processes, and procedures with humans in mind? And do our managers and supervisors on the front lines actually understand and follow those same systems, processes, and procedures? If not, the root cause of that failure is most often leadership, not the worker.
As usual when it comes to principles, true authentic leadership is the catalyst and sustaining force that enables all of them. Being authentic means having integrity, being open and consistent in your behavior with others, being humble, of service to others, and leading with purpose. Think of this leadership as a combination of the wheel that holds the spokes together and the outer tire which keeps that wheel rolling.
In any field—and especially in safety and security—where there is often a gap between its importance from an external public perspective versus the internal professional perspective, getting this leadership right is critical to enabling strategic vision to translate into tactful execution on the ground.
Reposted from The Verge
Sierra Imwalle, a real estate agent in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously. When she shows houses to clients, she takes precautions: masks, distance, hand sanitizer. She’s avoiding the denser, usually crowded downtown area and steering clear of restaurants.
Other people in Ann Arbor are also sticking to public health recommendations, she says. They’re wearing masks and following stay-at-home orders. “We’ve done a really good job maintaining a low number of cases,” she says.
But Ann Arbor is a college town. Downtown brushes up against the campus of the University of Michigan, a sprawling research university that enrolls just under 50,000 students each year. It’s home to Michigan Stadium (nickname: the Big House), the largest stadium in the United States, which can seat over 100,000 people.
The university plans to welcome its students back to campus for the fall semester, with classes starting on August 31st. Most classes will be offered online, but residence and dining halls are opening. The school is encouraging students to follow social distancing guidelines and mandating that they wear masks, but only students in on-campus housing (usually under a third of the student body) will have to get tests before they return.
Michigan joins hundreds of other colleges and universities around the country that are planning for an in-person or partially in-person fall semester. As students drive and fly from their hometowns back to campus, inevitably, some will carry the coronavirus with them, says Sheldon Jacobson, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an expert in data-driven risk assessment. “Colleges and universities just are not designed for social distancing, it’s not in the DNA of institutions of higher learning to keep people apart. We bring them together,” he says.
When outbreaks happen, they won’t stay on campus. Students rent apartments, go to grocery stores, and clog up the tables at restaurants. Professors and staffers live in town and send their kids to public schools. But most college and university reopening plans, even the best ones, are focused on their students, Jacobson says. They don’t talk as much about the people who live next door.
People who live in Ann Arbor are worried. They know that there isn’t an easy decision here. The University of Michigan makes the city of Ann Arbor what it is, and everyone is connected to it in some way. They’re pretty sure, though, that the influx of students will mean more COVID-19 cases in their community.
“There is a bit of concern that all of the hard work and the sacrifices we’ve had to make will end up not being worth as much,” Imwalle told The Verge.
t’s always a big event in Ann Arbor when students come back to campus in the fall, says Tom Crawford, the interim city administrator. “It really changes the whole pace of life we have here,” he says. “It has an economic impact, it has a social impact — it’s a major thing.” That’ll be even more true this year, even though Crawford is still not sure what portion of the student body will end up coming back to Ann Arbor. Regardless of the numbers, their return is a risk, and he’s concerned about the way it will change the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city.
“I believe that college towns are the place to watch for the virus right now,” he says. “Universities draw people from all over. It’s a new phase.”
Counties with college towns stand out in the projections, Rubin says. South Bend, home to the University of Notre Dame, jumps out from the rest of Indiana. Clarke County, Georgia is a red flag — it’s where the University of Georgia, which already has hundreds of cases, is located. The university is in Athens, which is already out of ICU beds. Some of the struggling Michigan counties are the ones where Michigan State University and the University of Michigan are located, Rubin says. By the end of July, there had already been 6,600 cases of COVID-19 linked back to college campuses, according to The New York Times.
“I’m worried about what I’m already seeing,” Rubin says. “What happens when they fully repopulate?”
Outbreaks at small colleges in mid-sized cities, or even big universities in bigger cities, may not have an effect on their local community’s coronavirus transmission, Jacobson says. Their student bodies are a relatively small proportion of the town population. But larger colleges and universities based in small towns could have an impact. Jacobson works for a university with 50,000 students in a city with around 100,000 residents. Ann Arbor is about the same: around 120,000 residents and 50,000 students.
“The ratio of the students coming in to the residents is sufficiently large that it tilts the scale to having community transmission,” Jacobson says.
It’s technically possible to live in Ann Arbor and hardly know the campus is there. If you keep away from downtown and don’t go to the grocery store close to campus, the students can stay pretty invisible, Marty Lewis says. “Yet, at the same time, there’s no denying that Ann Arbor is what it is because of the university’s presence,” he says.
Lewis is an alum and is a superintendent for a general contractor. “The university has pretty much been my only client for the last eight years,” he says. Sierra Imwalle has a lot of clients who work for the university. Another local, Trisha York, is a nurse at Michigan Medicine, the university’s health center, and her husband has a small business in town — it depends on the students.
There’s probably an economic benefit in the town to the students coming back. “But is it worth the risk? I don’t see that,” Lewis says.
York says she’s worried about masks. “People are coming from all over the country,” she says. She’s seen news reports — in some parts of the US, wearing a mask is less common than it is in Ann Arbor. “If they bring that kind of attitude with them, that concerns me.” She doesn’t trust that students will follow the same rules in town that the residents have been sticking to.
Colleges and universities can mandate that students wear masks and take certain precautions on campus, but it’s much harder to control what they do when they head into town. Administrators can set rules for dorms, but they don’t have as much oversight of students who live in apartments or houses off campus. At the University of Michigan, around 30,000 students live in off-campus housing.
“The university does not govern what happens off campus. They can only do so much,” says Juan Marquez, medical director in Washtenaw County, which contains Ann Arbor.
The county health department has been working with the university since the spring to coordinate what they might do in response to any large parties or gatherings. They’re worried about bars: in the nearby East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, a college bar was the source of nearly 200 COVID-19 cases. They’re already getting complaints about student gatherings from members of the community.
Ann Arbor city administrator Crawford, like the health department, is thinking about student social gatherings. Student housing in town is also at the top of mind, he says — there are dozens of apartments and houses with multiple students in one unit. The biggest health risks will be social activities and living arrangements. “There’s a lot of discussion right now around how we can allow students to be students, but have it be in a healthy way at this unusual time,” Crawford says.
It doesn’t seem possible to Jacob Itkin, a sophomore at the University of Michigan. Itkin is from Ann Arbor and is planning on living at home with his parents while he takes classes online. People who are back on campus already aren’t wearing masks. “In classes you can sort of control people, but outside of school, people are going to go out and do regular things,” he says. “It seems like it’s going to be a big mess.”
Similar conversations are happening in college towns all around the country. The town council in Mansfield, Connecticut, home to the University of Connecticut, authorized new limits on the size of gatherings in town in direct response to students’ return (they still have to be approved by the state). “Wesleyan is a big house-party, dorm-party school,” he told the Hartford Courant. “And those could be incubators for this virus if people are not smart about it.”
Fearing they could become a new viral hotspot, the Orange County, North Carolina health department recommended that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill move to online-only education. Community members told the health department that they were concerned about the students’ return, a spokesperson told The Chronicle of Higher Education. The university decided not to follow that recommendation. Less than a week after classes started, there were already four clusters of COVID-19 in student housing.
If the coronavirus starts to spread on campuses and in college towns, it could strain the resources of local public health departments. Washtenaw County has a limited number of contact tracers, and the number of students returning could challenge their capacity. The university has a handful of case investigators that can handle contact tracing for students, Marquez says. The extra help could ease the county’s burden to an extent. The university’s contact tracers have ties with the university dorms, food services, and transportation, but it may not be enough in the event of an outbreak. The county health department still plays a role in every new COVID-19 case, student or not.
Arizona State University professors, staffers, and graduate students pointed to the limited local resources as a major concern in an open letter calling for the university to delay in-person instruction. “The likely outbreak caused by the concentration of faculty, staff, and students will further strain critical community resources like ICU beds and medical personnel,” it reads.
When outbreaks happen on campuses, universities and colleges seem to be ready to blame their students for breaking the rules, wrote epidemiologist Julia Marcus and psychiatrist Jessica Gold in The Atlantic. It’s a bad strategy — students shouldn’t be charged with shouldering the burden of their community’s health. “Students are being set up to take the fall when the plans fail,” they said. “Universities have no business reopening if they can’t provide a healthy environment for students, faculty, and staff.”
Back in Ann Arbor, Crawford is in regular communication with the University of Michigan. Over the next few weeks, he says, they’re going to roll out messaging for both students and the local community. The university’s director of community relations is in regular contact with Ann Arbor officials, university spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald told The Verge in an email. Fitzgerald said representatives from the university are meeting with local business leaders, as well. He pointed to the website where the University of Michigan has been posting its plans for the fall.
Lewis, though, hasn’t found that information easily accessible. He doesn’t feel like the university has reached out to the community, even if they are talking with town leaders, and he’s frustrated by what he sees as a lack of communication. “I don’t see any evidence that the university has done any kind of good outreach to say, ‘Here’s our plan,’” he says. There isn’t a local, daily newspaper in Ann Arbor anymore, he says. He thinks that might be the reason why he hasn’t seen relevant information about the university’s plans.
While conversations may be happening behind the scenes, Itkin, the sophomore, doesn’t think the safety of the town plays a big part in the University of Michigan’s thinking. “If they cared, they probably wouldn’t be bringing students back,” he says. “It’s that simple. If it wasn’t just about getting more money.”
The University of Michigan’s plans for the fall semester center on the student body and on the campus environment. That’s the focus of any college or university: the people who are formally a part of it. The frequently asked questions page covers the use of face coverings on campus, dining hall protocols, and parents weekend. It doesn’t mention the residents of the town of Ann Arbor.
That’s been the constant theme of return-to-campus plans, Jacobson, the risk assessment expert, says. Of all the return-to-campus plans he’s reviewed, very few mention the local town. Most colleges and universities aren’t talking publicly about their conversations with mayors or their partnerships with nearby hospitals. “The towns don’t really have a voice to the degree that they need to,” he says.
That disconnect during the pandemic could exacerbate tensions between college towns and the institutions that are their backbone. If there aren’t major outbreaks associated with the school, the relationship with the local community might stay about the same. If the pandemic starts to accelerate, though, things could deteriorate. “It’s hard to shake, if those kinds of incidents occur,” Jacobson says.
Ann Arbor is in a relatively good spot. So far, the state of Michigan managed the pandemic fairly well. The county has lower levels of transmission to start the school year than many other college towns, including South Bend, Indiana, home of rival Notre Dame. And normally, people in Ann Arbor have a fairly good relationship with the University of Michigan. “It’s a love-hate relationship. You take the bad with the good,” York, one of the locals, says. Even if there is an outbreak, she doesn’t think things would sour. She expects people would be more concerned about taking care of the kids.
“I could see some people feeling resentful — probably not towards the kids, although it might come out that way, but to the university for maybe not doing more to make sure it didn’t spread,” York says. “It’s just such a complicated thing.”
Imwalle agrees. She doesn’t want to blame anyone, and she knows there aren’t any good answers. “It’s a lose-lose. No matter how you slice it.” She’d been thinking about going to a restaurant in town, though, and seeing how it felt. “The closer we get to the student’s coming back, I think I may just wait and see.”
Reposted from Fortune
The next time people visit the Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum in Canada to see World War II–era tanks and artillery, a virtual avatar named Master Corporal Lana will welcome and screen them for COVID-19.
It’s part of the museum’s plan to open to the public on Saturday after having shut down since mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic. After all, Lana, who is purely digital, can’t spread COVID-19.
As Jeremy Blowers, the executive director of the museum, in Oshawa, Ontario, explained, the chatbot helps protect staff and volunteers from COVID-19 as well as give a glimpse into the future of how cutting-edge technology can be used for education.
The Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum has more than 140 operational military vehicles including tanks and cargo carriers used in the 20th century up to recent conflicts like the Afghanistan War, he said.
Blowers noted that the museum had been developing Lana before the coronavirus outbreak as a way to stay up-to-date with technological trends like augmented reality that could help attract visitors, particularly younger people. After the coronavirus pandemic hit, forcing the museum to close on March 15, Blowers had a eureka moment, deciding to use Lana as a greeter when the museum finally reopened.
He said Lana has a “welcoming and cool factor” that he suspects visitors will enjoy.
“And youths don’t want to sit at a kiosk,” Blowers said about using a more conventional check-in device.
The museum partnered with business software startup CloudConstable and Intel to develop and operate Lana, which users will interact with via a 3.5-foot digital screen. Cameras that are connected to the screen help Lana recognize and respond to people when they walk up and talk to her.
Lana isn’t the most realistic looking digital avatar; she resembles a character from a mid-2000s video game who has slicked-back brown hair and wears military fatigues. But she gets the job done when it comes to asking basic COVID-19-related questions.
During a typical Lana interaction, which Blowers said will last 54 seconds, the chatbot asks visitors six COVID-19 screening questions, such as whether they’ve left Canada during the past 14 days or whether they or someone in their family have experienced coronavirus-related symptoms.
Unfortunately, Lana can’t pick up on whether someone is lying to her. But Blowers said a human staff member will be near Lana, behind a glass panel, ensuring things go smoothly and that no one is “taking stuff off the walls and leaving.”
Additionally, people talking to Lana will have their body temperature checked as an additional COVID-19 safety measure. Museum staff will follow up with anyone who fails their COVID-19 screening.
Although Blowers is excited about the museum’s reopening, he expects only a fraction of the number of visitors who typically come to see the institution’s collection. The museum normally has 200 visitors on a Saturday or Sunday, but he thinks there will be only about 40 people, who have already bought their tickets online.
And despite the precautions the museum is taking, such as requiring people to wear masks and socially distance, as well as providing hand sanitizer, he’s concerned about contracting the virus.
“It’s frightening,” he said.
But he feels an obligation to be at the museum to let the public in.
“I wouldn’t be in the industry and gone through the trouble if I wasn’t at heart a history nerd and a teacher,” Blowers said. “I love sharing knowledge with the public.”
The FBI estimates that art crime is multi-billion-dollar-a-year illicit industry, and while much of it is made up of low order theft, the plundering of a museum never fails to steal headlines.
Earlier this summer, an opportunistic thief stole a Van Gogh painting from a Dutch museum in an audacious smash-and-grab. News reports widely noted the work’s $6 million value on the legitimate market, but what is the true worth of a stolen masterpiece? Who buys a work that can’t be publicly shown?
We consulted experts on what actually happens to a work of art once it has been stolen. Here are the five pathways that thieves tend to take to cash in on their larceny.
When we hear about a museum heist, we might picture a wealthy billionaire presiding over a vast trove of the world’s most wanted art.
Indeed, there have been a few people caught stealing art for their own private collections, such as the notorious French art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who made off with some 239 artworks from museums. Or the seemingly innocuous Tucson couple, who were discovered to have had a $160 million stolen Willem de Kooning hanging in their bedroom for decades. But art crime professor Erin Thompson, who works at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, tells Artnet News that this is rare. “We’ve busted plenty of reclusive, unscrupulous, powerful art lovers, from dictators to drug lords, but we haven’t found stolen masterpieces on their walls,” she says.
While an elaborate heist of the Mona Lisa on behalf of a villainous art buff might make a good Hollywood movie, the reality is often much more prosaic. More often, thieves spot a vulnerability in a museum’s security system, steal the art, and find out later that it is harder to move than they previously thought.
Thompson says that the most successful thieves have actually targeted objects for their raw materials rather than the object as a whole. For example, it is less conspicuous to break off a valuable horn from a taxidermy mount, or to melt down an object for the value of its precious metals, or break up jewelry to sell as individual pieces (which was most likely the fate of the diamonds stolen from Dresden’s Green Vault). But outside of an investment in a co-ownership scheme, one square inch of a Van Gogh painting isn’t worth a whole lot to anyone.
Christopher Marinello, chief executive at Art Recovery International, who has been working in the field of lost art for 30 years, tells Artnet News that thieves will often try to sell a work back to the museum that it was stolen from. In 80 percent of cases, Marinello says that criminals will either try to hold the work for ransom, or wait for the museum to announce a reward for the return of the work.
But this doesn’t always work. Some museums will refuse to negotiate with criminals, and the risk of getting caught in a sting operation while collecting on a ransom or a reward is high. There is currently a $5 million reward out for information leading to the recovery of 13 priceless masterpieces that were stolen in the infamous 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, but the paintings have never been recovered.
Other times, thieves will go directly to the insurance company, as ownership of the work often passes to the insurer after it has paid out for losses. Marinello, who has several art insurance companies as clients, says it is not uncommon for thieves to try and ransom work to the insurance company directly.
Sometimes, thieves have inside knowledge of museum’s insurance policies, but other times they just mike a wild guess—which doesn’t always pay off. Insuring irreplaceable artwork against theft is sometimes prohibitively expensive for museums; the Gardner paintings, for example, were not insured against theft. But Thompson says that if there is theft coverage, insurance companies generally offer a no-questions-asked reward for return. “So, you can steal a painting and give it to your girlfriend to hand over to the insurers—she’ll say she found it in a bus stop and you’ll get around 10 to 15 percent of the value of the art,” Thompson says.
Thieves who fail to cash out from museums or insurers may attempt to sell their acquisition on the legitimate market, such as through auction houses or dealers.
This is easiest when the objects have not yet been reported as stolen, which is why Thompson says that smarter thieves will target objects that aren’t currently on display, preying on the weaknesses of underfunded museum storage facilities or library stacks.
In cases where the missing work has been reported, the thief will be hard pressed to find a reputable art dealer today who neglects their due diligence. There are several databases of stolen artworks, from the Art Loss Register to the FBI and Interpol that dealers can easily cross check before committing to a purchase. All it takes is a couple of clicks from a prospective buyer to land a criminal in the clink, as was the case in the Transy Book heist, when thieves tried to have Christie’s appraise more than $5 million worth of rare books, or the fate of a pair of knuckleheaded art thieves who tried to flog a group of stolen paintings to an art dealer in Bucharest.
That said, there are still some places—Marinello singles out Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—where buyers tend to be less scrupulous about the origins of objects.
One possible trajectory for the Van Gogh painting that was stolen earlier this summer was revealed more recently when a photograph of the stolen work surfaced as an ad in the criminal underworld.
According to the experts, the black market is the last resort for art thieves hoping to monetize their stash. There, criminals are hard pressed to find a legitimate buyer and, as FBI art crime specialist Christopher McKeogh tells Artnet News, there is risk associated with the sale. “Individuals have been known to create fake versions of well-known stolen works,” McKeogh says. “If a stolen artwork is discovered on a black market, there’s a good chance it could be a fake and completely unrelated to the original theft.”
This is why art sells for a fraction of its true value on the black market, as the infamous Dutch thief Octave Durham found out, much to his chagrin, when he unloaded two Van Gogh paintings that he had stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 to an Italian mobster for less than $400,000.
Once circulating in the criminal underworld, masterpieces take on a whole new currency and trajectory that has far less to do with aesthetics than with their value as collateral.
Drug traffickers have been known to use stolen artwork for loan security, and artwork can be traded for weapons. In these cases, McKeogh says, “it is always hoped that the thieves know how to stabilize or care for what are usually fragile items.”
Often, works end up in the hands of mobsters who use them as “get-out-of-jail-free” cards, turning over information on their whereabouts in exchanged for reduced sentences. That is often the case when works mysteriously turn up, as it happened with a Gustav Klimt painting was discovered in an alcove in the museum’s garden. Ultimately, Durham’s stolen Van Goghs ended up in the hands of an Italian gangster used them to negotiate a lesser sentence for drug trafficking.
One can only hope for such an ending for the Van Gogh that was just stolen this summer from the Dutch museum—for the sixth and final pathway for stolen art is much more tragic.
It is an “investigator’s greatest fear,” McKeogh says, that a thief may panic or grow frustrated and destroy a priceless work of art. This has been the case for many an ill-advised heists, such as the five Modernist paintings stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and dozens of Breitwieser’s stolen Old Masters, which ended up in the bottom of a canal.
This week, Trident Manor Limited (TM) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection (IFCPP).
Thanks to this strategic partnership, the two organisations will jointly:
“If provided with guidance and advice on how to recognize and respond to threats, staff can act as an additional layer of security to cultural venues and their collections. I am extremely pleased to collaborate with the IFCPP as it represents an important step in helping the international community in protecting our cultural heritage for future generations.”
Mr Andy Davis, Managing Director of TM
Trident Manor's Training Academy (TMTA), and the International Arts and Antiquities Security Forum (IAASF) an independent risk, security, and crisis management consultancy with years of experience in the field of cultural property protection. Its training programmes have been delivered internationally to more than 700 attendees. The activities of Trident Manor are supported by the Trident Manor
“One of our missions is to empower cultural heritage professionals around the world in protecting their cultural heritage. This strategic agreement with the IFCPP is a tremendous opportunity for both organisations to maximize the benefits from our mutual interest in educating others on ways of protecting cultural property and heritage more broadly”, said a spokesperson from TMTA.
The International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection is a membership-based non-profit organization that provides resource information, professional development, certification, and education for persons responsible for the protection of cultural properties.
“We are keen in developing and maintaining professional standards and ethical guidelines for the performance of protection-related services. For this reason, we look forward to collaborating with Trident Manor in order to benefit all our members worldwide, and for sharing of industry best practices and expanded outreach and experiences.”
Mr Robert N. Layne, Executive Director of the IFCPP
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