Welcome to Introduction to Tamper Evident Devices.  So I have a pretty solid background in tamper evident technologies. I just gave a two-day class earlier this week at Black Hat on this very subject. I also do a lot of non-destructive entry stuff. So I think lock picking, safe cracking, making friends with guards, and so on and so forth. I also do forensics, particularly forensic locksmithing. So determining if locks have been picked or bumped or opened with things other than a key. And like many of you, I also do computer security.  I run a couple websites, such as Lockwiki, Lockpicking Forensics, and eventually Tamper Wiki will have something more than a cool splash page that I got bored and made. I'm also the leader. Am I the leader? I'm the leader of a tamper team called the Motherfucking Professionals. And for the record, if anybody is wondering why we picked that name, it's because John used to ask me, like, can we do this?  So that's that. We won the tamper contest last year, which was the first ever tamper evident contest, ran by DT. And I'm proud to say that this year we've won all four levels.  There's a cord here, and I'm not, Jesus. I thought this was a professional conference. OK, so what's the difference? We have terms. We all work in security. We all have retarded things that we wonder, why do people say that? Why is that on every box I buy for security products? So these three terms, tamper resistant, tamper proof, and tamper evident as a fourth pseudo term is anti-tampering. So what do those mean? So a product that's tamper resistant is actively made to deter tampering. Now what tampering is may vary depending on the product, but generally it's anything other than normal use. So for our water bottle, if we take off, thanks. I didn't realize I needed this prop, but thanks.  So the water bottle has this little seal. So if we take the seal off and put something in the water, that'd be tampering, as long as we put it back and it looks right. Something that's tamper proof doesn't exist, but a lot of companies use the term to denote something that cannot be tampered with. And that, by definition, means every definition that you can think of for tampering would be protected against. So it's the same like saying, are these computers hack proof or whatever? So we all think that's retarded, and that's retarded. And then our last term is tamper evidence. So that's something that doesn't necessarily resist tampering, much like our water bottle, but it is determined to leave evidence of whatever methods of tampering that you did to the product. So tamper evidence itself, anything that leaves evidence. Usually, in a general sense, we say tampering is unauthorized access, alteration, or replacement. You can also use counter-fitting and so on and so forth. So why don't we just use locks, where we would use these tamper-evident products? Because locks actively prevent entry. That's their goal. Some locks are tamper-evident. They're meant to show that the lock has been opened with something other than the key. But that's not always the case. So the main thing is, is it better to prevent an attack or detect an attack? So think about that. Think about shipment of nuclear materials. Is it better to prevent someone messing with it or better to detect when someone has messed with it? Because by attempting to prevent, we assume that we'll be able to detect all of these methods by default, or that they would not happen. Tamper devices, by their very nature, that's the Yeager kicking in, they enforce you to inspect them. Because again, they're not locks. They're not resistant to tampering or physical abuse. And locks are pretty expensive by comparison. These tamper seals are just little metal or plastic things that look a lot like locks. They're essentially one-way locks. But they cost a lot less. And think of also the cost of maintaining key maintenance and key control and distributing keys and disposing of keys and all that kind of stuff. And then you also have to consider environmental considerations. Will a lock function in this environment? Will it get jammed up? Will I have to replace the keys? Will I have to re-pin the lock? So on and so forth. So who uses tamper-evident devices? The answer is all of us. We just may not think of them as such. So food and drug packaging, again, are from the water bottle. Blackout, I took the fire extinguisher from the room and I put it on stage and I got really mad about it. But those all have tamper seals on them. They inspect them or do whatever they do for the US Fire Marshal. And then they reseal them to show that it's been inspected and so on and so forth. A lot of drugs, pharmaceuticals, Tylenol, everything, that kind of stuff all have little tamper seals on them. So that when you buy the bottle, you open the box, you take off the shrink wrap, you open the bottle, all that kind of stuff. All are little tamper-indicating devices so we can tell if our pills have been screwed with. Pretty much everything, warranty protection, all of our DVD players and electronics like that usually have a little tamper sticker to determine when we've opened the case. The customs, Border Patrol use these a lot to secure cargo shipments and other kind of stuff. And then also think about confidentiality. So how do you determine, if I send a letter to you, how do you know I sent it or it wasn't modified and route? It's easy with digital stuff, easier, but it's a lot harder with physical things, because we have to inspect them and then how far are you willing to go to inspect them to ensure that that's the real deal. We also use them a lot for international stuff and government level, three letter agency level kind of stuff. So for example, nuclear safeguards. When we transport or, or I actually don't know what we do with nuclear materials, but whatever we do with them, we seal them. All these little containers that have the plutonium or whatever and we also use these heavily for treaty enforcement between countries.   So think in terms of like Pakistan and India and North Korea, China, in all these nuclear arms treaties, we have to say, okay, we're not gonna make bombs. How do we enforce that? A lot of that comes back to tamper seals. We seal them and then determine if they've been tampered with, you know, when the inspectors come, however routinely it is. So we're gonna go over a little history and then we're gonna talk about two basic types of seals. So this will just give you a brief overview of all the kind of stuff that you use in modern day. So the original idea was that we used a lot of clay or mud and we'd dry it over something. So think of a box, we're gonna cover it in clay and then put this pattern. So for you to gain access to the box, you have to figure out how to remove that clay and then put it back when you're done.  This is another example from, you know, a long, long ago and so we would, let's say we have our box again, we tie rope around it, right? So this is called a boulet and it's a little piece of clay that fits over the rope and then you stamp it in and it squishes into the rope and dries. So again, like our box covered in clay, you'd have to remove that to access the rope to open the box. The pope is awesome and he has a ring which he's kind of baller in that sense, right? He has a ring. So there's a guy, there's two guys, there's two guys. One guy, when the new pope, well, when the old pope exits, he has to melt his ring, right? When the new guy comes in, some other guy makes him a new ring and then they use that for stamping, papal insignia. And so you can see, here's a real old version, but tradition still continues to this day and usually they do wax nowadays. In mid 1800s, we started combining locks with seals and it's pretty cool because, you know, again, we think, why not use locks? Why use seals? Why not use both? Have the best of both worlds. So this is an example of a real old padlock and you can see on the right here, there's this little piece that kind of swings open and that allows you access to the keyway. So they figured, well, why don't we just put the stamp over that and then close that up and then to get access to the keyway, you'd have to remove the stamp, right? Now we'll ignore any, you know, well, what if you don't need to use the keyway to open the lock? There's also a lot of locks from this time period that have little glass plates so when you lock it, a little glass plate slides over the keyway and you'd have to shatter that to get access to it. During World War I, World War II, we started doing a mail censorship and probably before that, so essentially what it is is you send some piece of mail somewhere along the way, the censor says, okay, flag that. So they cut it open, right? Then they see, they read what it is, they determine if it's okay to go through. They tape it back up and then they put a stamp over it and you can see over in the top left here, they even write what language the letter was in. And then again, we also use this kind of similar stamping stuff to make sure that our mail has gone through the mail system properly. A very cool story is beginnings of the Cold War, beginnings of the CIA, they had a lot of difficulty with communicating back and forth, excuse me, the CIA had a lot of difficulty communicating with agents in Moscow. So what they did was they did this elaborate program where they bought thousands of different postcards and they sent them to and from different addresses, different recipients, and they put different things on them like in Moscow, from Russia with love, so on and so forth. And then when they reached their destination, the CIA would go back and look at them, determine which ones had been tampered with by the Russians, and then determine which methods they used to try and detect tampering and then which postcards weren't didn't qualify for whatever censorship or tampering that the Russians did. So through all this, they look at the pattern and say, well, if we send it to Ohio and it's in this rural area, maybe it doesn't get flagged and so on and so forth. So it's a very, very cool project and I think it's a lot of it's in Family Jewels if you wanna look that up to read more about it. I don't remember the name of the project but it's also documented a lot in the book SpyCraft. I just think it's a really cool thing that 70 years ago we were thinking, well, how do we detect mail tampering and how can we prevent it? How can we get around people doing it? Cause obviously you can't tamper everything that goes through the mail system. It's just not logistically possible. So you gotta pick and choose. In the 1980s in Chicago, there was a lot of scares where Tylenol pills were replaced with cyanide pills. And so you can see on the left is Tylenol and the right is cyanide Tylenol. So people started dying from this and there was this huge scare where Tylenol was rushed off the shelves and Johnson Johnson, owner of Tylenol, said, we can't detect tampering at the factory level so it must be further down the chain. And to this day, it hasn't been determined how this happened.  All the boxes have been tampered with kind of thing.  So now we get to more modern day seals. After the whole fiasco in Chicago, we instituted the Federal Anti-Tampering Act and so all pharmaceuticals now have to have these different layers of protection. So I think of it just like computer security where we have defense in depth. We don't just have a firewall or a, what the hell do we use in computer security these days?  So now you have to open the box and inside the box you take your little shrink wrap off.   On a lot of electronics we use these little warranty stickers, right? So this is the first generation of this particular Xbox tamper seal and it's just this little silver seal that says Microsoft. If you try and pull it up it leaves a little residue that says void or opened or whatever it is. And so there started to be videos of people taking these off on YouTube. And Microsoft, I believe there are official responses that well that's cool and we're always looking to make our product better so they instituted a new seal and now there's videos of this being removed with a hairdryer on YouTube. It's essentially a sticker. So I think you're all comfortable removing stickers at one point or another. We use these a lot. One thing I found out recently was that the duty-free bags at airports you could actually take different kinds of chemicals on board planes as long as they're sealed in the duty-free bag. Now, depending on where, yeah right?  And it's funny for me cause I actually it's not legal for me to fly cause I have all these dangerous chemicals that I use for the tamper stuff and I can't be like, hey can I bring this gallon of acetone on board? I paint my nails a lot. So I found out that you could actually take these on with certain size, certain chemicals as long as they're sealed.  But I think it's very interesting that we rely on these. On the right is a check and deposit bag that is used by a lot of banks.  But if somebody tries to take a portion of it, they have to figure out how to get that out and then reseal it without leaving evidence. Now obviously the missing cash may be evidence but think of if we wanna transport sensitive documents or company secrets and so on and so forth in these. I gotta stop saying so on and so forth, don't I? We also use these to seal evidence bags similar to the plastic bag here on the right. There's a lot of evidence bags that look the same. This is just a manila folder with some evidence tape over the edges but we use these pretty heavily for this kind of stuff. We started using these not too long ago in electronics.  And I took it all apart and then I reprogrammed it so that like titties appear when I boot up or whatever. And so companies are actively trying to stop that, stop reverse engineering of their products, stop modification. Again, we could go back to like Xboxes and stuff where they don't want you to mod it or do anything against what they want you to do with it. So they started making both tamper evident and tamper resistant electronics. So in the photo is just this little chip and all the leads are coated in a thin layer of epoxy. So if you wanted to remove this chip or get access to the leads, you'd have to remove that and then figure out how to repair it.  So it's essentially just a little black box at that point where you don't really know what it does but it just plugs in somewhere and then hopefully it works. It's used a lot on little DRM chips too and military crypto electronics. A lot of these are also tamper resistant where they destroy themselves if they detect tampering and so on. How many of you have a blackberry or an iPhone? If you take off the back right now you could see a little white seals and some of them are water sensors and some of them are little covers for the screws so that if you wanted to take your device apart you'd have to remove all those little stickers or break them when you put the screwdriver so all of these are little warranty protection type things. The water sensors don't really evidence tampering so much since the only thing they do is detect water or other types of liquids but for the most part just water. So a lot of people ask me, well what about like tilt sensors on packaging? Like you send a crate and you put a tilt sensor in it.  How many of you have to take a piss test for work? Funny story, in the contest this year there was a medicine bottle that looked pretty similar and I filled it with apple juice and there's a picture of me drinking it like that. Yeah and another team used Jack and Water that looked a lot like P2. I don't know what's with us in P but let's stop talking about P. Anyways, we use these for a lot of medical type stuff so specimen containers and you can see the blood vials in the center and then even some more expensive medicine bottles will actually have a tamper evident seal so that you have to physically break it and it's not like the normal seals like the one on the left here or the normal kind of water bottle seal. It's meant to not be able to go back to the way it was. You all have gas, water and power.  You can just snap these off with your fingers. It's just a little piece of plastic but if it's gone the next time the guy comes to check your meter he files a report saying something may have been tampered with and then they choose to investigate or not. For cargo transportation we use more heavy duty seals for the most part. We'll talk about different types of seals in a bit but these are called bolt seals and they're essentially just a one-way lock that snaps through the half of a truck. The IAEA does a treaty monitoring for North Korea and this is an example of a cup seal that they use and so this half of the cup seal is actually not unique so you could technically replace it with one of the same size and the same hole diameter and the same hole position. But what they do is they take a little knife and they scratch it up in here and they add little dabs of solder and then they take a picture of it. They seal it up, the next time they come they inspect the outside. When they're ready to remove the seal they cut it open and look at this and compare it with the picture to determine if it's been tampered with. This is a photo of Marines sealing a can of nuclear material with just a little tamper seal and if you remember back to our evidence slide this is essentially that same little red adhesive just being applied to the nuclear container. So as with most security products there's a lot of bullshit and so one thing I found really funny is that everyone who sells zip ties markets them as tamper proof and I thought that was pretty funny. Now how many of you are uncomfortable opening a zip tie? Did not think so. What if it's a pulled tight zip tie? A little more tricky, huh? Step it up. There's also dedicated tamper companies and most of them represent their products as being more secure than they really are and that was one of the motivations for DT starting the contest last year and continuing it on this year and next year. So you'll see it's just a little sticker similar to our Microsoft warranty sticker. When you pull it up it just says void and the wording to the right says impossible to reseal or reuse. Another one is these little metal padlock security seals which sounds very intimidating but essentially just this little frangible, is that a word? We'll find out later. It's just this little shackle that fits through the body and it snaps into place and it says positively tamper proof. We'll get back to him later. So, what makes something tamper evident, right? Is a water bottle tamper evident? Is an envelope tamper evident?  So something that's tamper evident should be durable to everything. I'm gonna try walking around and we'll see how it works. Something that's tamper evident should be durable but it should be weak. It should not resist physical attacks, right?  There's extremely few seals that are actually resealable because, you know, think if it's resealable, it's essentially a lock that you can lock and unlock at will, given the right tools and skill and a lot sort of stuff. Tamper seals usually have unique identifiers to prevent you from just swapping one out and counter-fitting it. And they're sensitive to basically everything other than a tug test. And so what a tug test is is where you seal your seal and we'll talk about this particular seal in a second. You seal it up and then you just pull it, right? So we know it's locked. So what if I pulled it and it snapped, right? If I'm just pulling lightly, then that may evidence tampering, right? And there also should be very weak to things like temperature or different chemicals and so on and so forth. So how do we inspect tamper seals? And this is a talk all on its own but we can think we just look at them casually. I go, oh, do, do, do, do. And then you can look at them closely and see if there's any little scratches or missing pieces. You can also disassemble them if they are disassembleable. And then you can get to serious science where you're saying what trace evidence is in on the seal or their fingerprints there, or their hair and fiber, that kind of stuff. And then there's also seals that have traps or alarms.  An example of a trap would be like the little ink things when you go to the department store and all the clothes you wanna buy are the ink things. So if you try and remove that, it sprays ink everywhere. And so that's considered a trap. An alarm's more like when you're in the same department store and you just try to walk out and the siren goes off. So what does defeating a seal mean? So this is kind of ambiguous. Defeating a seal doesn't mean just pulling it apart because it's pretty easy just to pull most of these apart. So by defeating it, we mean that we open it and we reseal it, which sometimes is the harder part, and we leave little to no evidence of tampering as little as possible. So there's vulnerabilities kind of everywhere. So we can think of, there's problems with the design, something that the end user just can't fix. There's problems with procuring seals. So what if I start a malicious tamper seal company that sells flawed seals, right? And you buy seals from me. What about storage of your seals? If somebody has access to your seals before you install them, can they be tampered with and then made vulnerable to different attacks? What about installation? You can definitely install a lot of these wrong to reduce the security they offer. And then of course, the biggest thing is the human element. You know, to identify tampering, you need to have somebody actually look at it. There's no good automated way to do it. Now you can say, of course, we have electronic tamper seals that will alarm and do that kind of stuff, but that kind of stuff tends to make us lazy. And so we just need to say, you know, and the guy pushes the button to see if it's been tampered with, it tells them no. And there's a lot of ways we can fake that. And then think about also how you remove or dispose of the old seals when you pull them off the container when they get to their destination.  So the first thing we're gonna talk about is called mechanical seals.  So think of it like a little half spun a door and we have this little tiny tamper seal around it. Top on the door, you need to break this seal in theory. So zip ties, seriously zip ties.  Again, show of hands, how many people are worried about a zip tie? Fully sealed zip tie? Those are tricky. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna talk about is the beaded cable seal and I have one here. You wanna pass it around?  I'll seal it for you. And you know, just pull on it lightly, see how it feels. Don't tighten it too much, but play with them, see how they feel. And essentially it's just this little cable that fits through the body and once you push it through enough, it locks into place. So it's basically a fancy zip tie. How confident are you that you could beat this now? One guy, jeez. I thought you guys were pros. You had like the whole fully locked zip tie thing down. So I tried to do this earlier when I was drunk and I ripped the shim, but you can essentially just put a little coke can through there and get it around the cable and you push in and then once you get it through, you're essentially doing the same thing with the zip tie where you're separating the teeth from the cable, then you could just pull it back out. And there's a lot of these seals and they look different now and then, but they're essentially the same thing, right? They're just these little plastic or metal pieces and you snap them together and they're glorified zip ties. Some are two-sided, some are four-sided, some have two rows with a divider in the middle so you gotta shim both of them. And again, shimming's not the only defeat. Think of, you know, a lot of these don't have serial numbers. Can we just swap in another one of the same color? Of the same model? Lots and lots of different defeats. So again, go back to, you know, our list of different places we can attack them and just think of all the different things we could do to these basic little seals. Next type of seal we're gonna talk about is called the plunger seal. Now, one thing I should mention is that all the companies that sell these have really tarted names for them so they all call them truck seal. So it makes it really hard to talk to somebody and say, hey, you know that truck seal? And they're like, oh, which of the 5,000 are we talking about?  And hopefully I'll just give enough talks that everybody else starts using the terminology. But it's essentially just this little piece that snaps in. So it's similar to our little cable seal, but it covers the piece that we would wanna manipulate. And you can see that the little flanges here kinda prevent you from sticking something in and pushing those little legs back. But on most of these, they're capped. So the way that they seal this is that they form the body, they put the little white piece in the detainer, and then they cap it, right? And then whenever you're ready, you just snap it into place. So I don't know why that slides there, but okay. So you can actually take caps from other ones and you could just pull the caps from existing ones, just using a little screw. You just screw it in there and pull it out. Sometimes you could use heat or boiling water to make it easier, but you could just pop that out and then put a new one in there. And no one's a wiser. And once you have the cap out, you have full access to the internals, so it becomes a zip tie again. And so you can see here in the photo, for our team, we have a big box of different little caps ready to go. So it saves us time when we want to do defeats. We just pop the existing one out and then pick the right color. And if we damage the white part in anyway, it's hard to see if it's right here. If we damage that, we just pop a new one in because they're all the same too. And none of these little pieces are serialized or unique. So there's other little plunger seals that are pretty common as well. Again, these are used a lot by the utility companies and they're essentially just the same thing. They're just a different little format. And you can see the one on the left doesn't even have a serial number. So if we find the same type of seal with a serial number, think can we print a new one on it? Because we have blank ones? Sure, why not? The padlock seals are called so because they resemble padlocks. And they're kind of nifty. The one on the left just uses little spring-loaded detainers that shoot out when you push the shackle in. So you can think, can I shim that?  You can actually just remove the shackle. You can cut it and take the pieces out and then put a new one in if you have it. And you know, all these other kinds of defeats we talk about.  So this is our tamper-proof seal, right? And so it's just this little piece that clips in similar to our plunger seal. So we have it here and you try and pull it, doesn't work. So you could of course just go in there with a lockpicking, push those little legs back and pull it out. What I thought was a really funny attack is you could take another shackle, which is funny, because you see they have these little tabs so it's supposed to be where you can put a serial number so you can't just replace the shackle. So we'll assume that they're serialized, but you just take another one and you kind of fit it down it. You see, somebody knows where I'm going with this. Oh, wait for it. And you take them out and it reseals. Super.  Should I pass it around?  Come here. I'm not throwing it. So I'll have fun with that. At the tamper evident contest, if they're still set up after the talk, they have some practice seals. If you want to just take one home to play with, I unfortunately don't have, well, I do have a million seals, but I didn't bring them. But I'll have a couple extras up here afterwards. The next seal we're going to talk about is also called a padlock seal, but for different reasons. So you see they have different designs, different places they put the serial, different little shapes up here and different shapes of the clip. But essentially, they're all the same thing. It starts open, right? And then you fix it to whatever you want to put it on and you snap it closed. And the little legs dig into this middle piece and the barbs prevent you from pulling it out.  I didn't push anything. We skipped several slides for no reason. So one cool attack is you could just clip it off, whatever it's on, and then you dunk it in saltwater or anything that's conductive. And you can use a battery or a power supply and you attach the leads to each side. And you could just, essentially, you rust it really fast. And because the main part of the seal is plastic, it's not affected. So you just rust these little metal pieces until they're gone. You pull the old clip out and put a new one in. And it works like a charm. So here's a picture of it once it's been through the electrolysis process. And now it's ready to take a new clip. Now it's a little difficult to do. Sometimes you have to scrape out whatever little bits of the old clip might be in there. But it's a really cool attack. And it only takes about half an hour.  You just clip it off and then put it in your solution and go. The other seal we're going to talk about is called metal cable seals. And this is the first of three seals, this type of seal, not necessarily the models that we're going to demo. This is the first of three that's approved by Customs and Border Patrol for their sealing needs, for all their tamper stuff. So they use the heavier duty cable seals, but essentially the same idea. And there was one that they use in this year's tamper contest. And I think all the teams defeated it, or at least the majority of them. So essentially what it is is you put the cable through one side. Oh, another one here. So you put the cable through one side, and then it should lock into place, just like our little beaded cable seal. And there's a little spring in there that pushes a little gear. So when you try and pull back, the teeth of the gear and the braiding of the cable make it so you can't pull out. So what we could do is just shim it. So I have one prepared. You can see it passes tug test. You want to, you, come here. So just tug on that cable a little bit to make sure it's locked. Give them a thumbs up if it's locked. All right. People think I'm bullshitting them sometimes. So we got audience participation and all that. So I have my shim kind of just inserted, but you see it's still locked. So what we're going to do is we're going to do the same we did for the other one, where we just kind of put it through. Oh, but I scrunched it. Oh, I broke it. Oh, I'm tarted. OK, it's done. I'm tarted.  Yeah, this one's locked. Oh, it's tarted. I ruined it. Sorry. Too much jagger. You can thank dark tangent for that. What you can also do is just put a little magnet on it, and it'll pull the gear away, and then you can pull the cable out. So hard drive magnets work. Obviously, you need a different magnet depending on the size of the gear, the strength of the spring, and the size of the cable, but definitely doable. The next seal we're going to talk about is called the metal ball seal. And every company I could find that sells these, sells them as tamper proof. No tamper resistant. No, maybe you can tamper it. Tamper proof. Every company I can find. And so what it is, is on the top is unsealed. And so you pull the strap through. And then normally, there's obviously the ball over this section. But there's rings clipped around each side. They don't go through. There's a ring like this, and it snaps together under the force. And when you push the strap through, it pushes the rings through, and they snap together when both sides can fit through the holes. And then you can't pull your strap out. So let's talk about, how can we defeat this? Because this is a pretty complicated lock. It's very simple in design. But how do we defeat it? So to defeat it by so-called picking, we'd have to rotate the rings back and spread each of them to get the strap out. So that's pretty hard. And there's some in the contest area you can look at. It's a very small little area that you have to work with. And trying to rotate and spread in that area is very difficult. We could always try cutting the strap somewhere that they might not look at and repairing it. It'll probably fail the tug test. But maybe that's a basic defeat you could try. And then what about, can we counterfeit it? Can we change the serial number? Can we take another one and re-serialize it? Can we make our own strap and then serialize that? These are all varying degrees of difficulty. But just think about that. What else can we do? Anybody? Ideas? Thoughts, comments, concerns? You guys are quiet. I'm sorry? You can manufacture the rings, but how do you get the rings in there apart? And how do you get new ones on? Because the ball doesn't come off even if you cut the rings. Ah. Sorry? Vibratory. No, that will not work because you need to actually spread the rings. Nice try, though. OK, so the defeat we came up with for this year's tamper contest is we made dies to re-crimp metal balls. So we get our target metal ball seal.  We take two halves from other seals. We put them back on after we separate the rings and take it apart, put it on wherever it's supposed to go. And then we just re-crimp it. So can you tell which of those photos has a tampered seal? Any of them? One, two, three of them? Why didn't tell the people at Black Hat? So I guess I can't tell you. But there's at least one of them that's been tampered with. It's difficult. And it's kind of a contrived thing, obviously, because you only see one view of the seals. But it's very difficult to tell. So think of this from arm's length. Very difficult to spot. The next seal we're going to talk about is a bolt seal. And we talked about this a little bit earlier. There's lots of different varieties. And do they serialize both the bolt and the body? Is the bolt all metal, or is it covered in plastic? And then they have various little anti-spin techniques. So here's what most of the insides look of them. And there's two varieties. One uses a little clip and one uses a ring. So this is an example of the clip one. It's just you put your bolt through, and then the clip snaps around the head of the bolt. And then you can't pull it out. You can also see on the left, it has these flats to prevent you from twisting the bolt while it's in. You could twist it if you turn hard enough, but you'll chew up the plastic. And again, that'll leave evidence of tampering. So let's talk about some basic defeats for these. We could just cut part of it off, and then try and reseal it and see how it works. Potentially difficult. It's easier on the all metal or all metal bolts, but varying degrees of success. We could also drill and repair or replace the bolt. So think is that hard? It's pretty hard, depending on the bolt. Some, the ones that actually don't spin, probably a little easier, because you don't have to worry about the bolt moving around.  Well, I'll tell you about something we did this year. We had a tamper-o-day. What we did was we made a custom little drill piece, and it just fit around the body of the bolt. And we put it on our drill and it spin it. So we spin it, and while spinning it, we pull both sides. And doing so causes friction between the little clip and the bolt. And it slowly choose away the bolt and the clip until it can pop open. And on tamperevidentwiki.com, after the conference, you guys can see all of our documentation. There's some videos of us doing this on YouTube. I think you just search Defcon 19 tampering. Yeah, Defcon 19 tampering, and you can see the video. And it works really quick, and it's pretty easy. And depending on the design of the bolt, it will leave no marks or a little marks. And it's kind of a beta thing. We need to work on the design of the tool. But for now, it works really well, even though it leaves some marks on the body from just having to grab it. But we're working on it. So the next thing we're going to talk about are called crimps and wraps. So the first type are crimps that are similar to our mechanical seals. But essentially, they're little pieces of lead or aluminum that we squish. And usually, we squish them around a wire or something.  So in this example, this little flag just gets rolled up over a wire. It's very tight, and it's hard to pull the wire out. Most of these basic types of crimps aren't serialized. So they're very easy to counterfeit. If you have the same, in this picture, it has a USLC type thing, they're very easy to defeat if you have the same type of crimp or if you can replicate that type of effect.  So here's an example of a squeeze crimp.  And these are kind of cool, because if you actually take the time to inspect them very thoroughly, then you can get a pretty good degree of anti-tampering out of them. Because think, every time you crimp one of these little pieces, it's going to deform in its own unique way. So if you take a really high resolution photograph of it, and then you inspect it in that same manner, then you could potentially detect alterations to it or replacement. There was a lot of lead seals in the contest this year. They're all defeated. I think we all basically use the same thing where we clip the cable, and then we put it back in and crimp over it so that it's stuck again. But there's lots of different things you could do. And again, so think about how far are you willing to go to detect tampering? Because it's obviously expensive the more you do, the farther you go. But are you willing to go that far? Think back to our example of Russia and the US with the postcards. How much mail are you willing to censor or pass through this tampering to detect spies and all that kind of stuff? This is a photo of the seal crimping tool.  There's these self-crimping seals that are pretty cool. And essentially, they're the same thing. You thread a wire through the back, but you could just snap them together with your fingers.  The ones that I found, at least, you could see on the right. That one's actually a fully locked thing. And you could just essentially put a little lockpick in there and push out the parts that need to be pushed out and reopen it. So this is something that's more familiar to you guys. And these are just little plastic wraps that fit around a lot of pharmaceuticals or food packages and that kind of stuff. And they kind of have mixed effectiveness. A lot of people put these on their products just to say, I have a tamper seal on my product, with no eye to how good it is or how valuable it is to quality assurance and that kind of stuff. But the real question with this kind of stuff on food and pharmaceuticals is, what's your real goal? So is your goal to prevent replacement of the pills, replacement of the bottle? Is your goal to prevent people opening it and doing whatever they're going to do with full access? What if we just take a needle and inject some kind of doping agent onto the pills? Would that be detected? Because obviously, for the most part, you can bypass this little seal. Now again, we talk about defense in depth. We have the, for our normal bottles, we have all these layers of things that we have to go through to open it. But think of these things, is that the right thing to do? A lot of these that are used aren't very good. And usually it's the design of the bottle, like this kind of seal is similar. And if you just put this in boiling water or just very hot water, it'll loosen up the plastic and you could just go pry it open. And depending on the container, what's inside of it, you could just get one off full and then just put it back on at your leisure. And the same is somewhat true for these, although these little plastic ones are a bit more, heat affects them a lot more than these bigger plastic seals. But a lot of them, how many of you have ever bought a product where you just kind of wiggled it off and you got it off intact, right? Oh, he was just raising his hand, he didn't have a question, I'm tarted, sorry. How many of you think of the ones you couldn't take off?  Probably not all the way, right? Usually very little, if any at all. So think how can we cut and repair that? And think, a lot of these are pretty easy to counterfeit because nobody really serializes them. So you could just, if you have another one, you rip this one off, put a new one on and then heat it back up so it shrinks. So think, again, how far are you willing to go to detect tampering? Are you gonna take photos of the exact pattern that your little plastic wrap seals on to whatever you're doing? As you get bigger and bigger, think huge companies, they can't afford to do this kind of detection. It's just a, well, we put a tamper seal on it because the law says we have to. The next and last thing we're gonna talk about are adhesives, and adhesives are super popular for sealing a lot of stuff. Almost all the packages we get are sealed with some form of adhesive. And then you can also extend this to think about envelopes and that sort of stuff, and the bank bags we talked about earlier. But adhesives are kind of, they're not very great. And one funny thing is that there's no standard for high security tamper adhesives. There's one for mechanical seals, but I thought the funny thing was is that they don't actually test for tampering for this standard until 2012. So there's all these seals that say, we're compliant, but it doesn't mean anything just yet because they haven't enforced this tamper evident testing. So adhesives are kind of bad because they're misunderstood. A lot of companies think you could just slap on a sticker on the back of your Xbox and then you're great.  But think of a more sophisticated attack. Can we shim it? Can we just put a piece of Coke can or wax paper and just get it up? Will heat help us get that off? Water, steam, solvents, temperature? Again, both hot and cold. And then also there's always counter-fitting. There was a funny situation earlier where they were judging the tamper contest and they said, when you apply this tape, because with all the contests to lift the tapes and put them back down, they said, did you get dust on here? And I go, no, when you use this roll, that's just how it looks. And they didn't like that at all. But we actually have dreams of one day giving back two boxes for our tamper contest because we can counterfeit so much of it that we could just duplicate it. But I'm told that's bad form. So we haven't done that yet. So the thing about this is that you could put whatever you want on a piece of tape, but that doesn't make it any better than a piece of tape. So this is an example called tamper evident tape and it's tape. And it's not very good at being tamper evident. Now, the main feature of this is that if you cut it, think again to our tarted example, if you just take your knife and you slice it open, it's gonna be very difficult to realign all these little lines so that they look right. But again, why do that when you could just put acetone or isopropyl or any of these things that you could buy in your local drug or hardware store or pharmacy to lift the tape? So the real questions are, when you look at an adhesive, is it serialized? What's it applied to? Is it on wood? Is it on plastic? Is it on metal? Is it on paper? Cause all these things depend how well it's gonna adhere. And then you gotta think what type of material is the adhesive, the backing? Tapes are a combination of a backing so like your little plastic layer and then adhesive under it. So you combine that with whatever you're sticking it to is gonna determine how well it sticks and how long you need to leave it before it sticks. Cause think about a big company.  You get an order in. You wanna get that out as fast as possible so that customers are satisfied. So you slap tape on it and then you send it out right away. Well that tape hasn't had time to cure. So it's gonna be a lot less resistant to attack. So think about how do you integrate all this kind of information into making a more secure tamper evident system? And then you gotta think, well what type of residue, if any, does the tape leave behind? How much do you really need to remove to open whatever it is you're working on? Cause the answer is generally never all of it. Almost, very rarely you have to remove the entire piece of tape, right? So the two things we have, and we'll just talk, we'll go right into them, is a full residue tamper tape and that's where if you pull the tape up, if you just physically force it up it'll leave behind a residue and that residue will be the full width of the tape. So you can see here there's a little residue all the way to the bottom, right? And then a partial residue tape will only leave a certain imprint. There's also what's called no residue tape where when you pull it up it doesn't leave anything behind on the substrate but it voids itself. So the tape now says void or whatever in the same way that this leaves behind residue. So let's talk about solvents cause solvents are probably one of my favorite aspects of adhesives even though I never paid attention in chemistry in school. So let's think about common solvents. Acetone, isopropyl, carbon tetrachloride is funny cause the CIA used to love it. I don't know if they still do. I'm actually not with the CIA if you hadn't noticed. But yeah, food. But it's extremely dangerous. So we don't really use it for the contests and I think it might even be illegal in a lot of the nearby states but it's actually extremely effective at lifting a lot of adhesives. Methyl ethyl ketone is pretty strong but it could be useful for some stuff and then pretty much the sky's the limit. Any type of solvent will probably work on something. Again, it depends on your backing, depends on your adhesive, depends on your substrate. All this kind of stuff. And so literally the sky's the limit. There's huge amounts of solvents you could pick from. I did a black hat teaser talk for the training and I didn't wanna show a solvent in it cause I wanted it for the contest and I wanted it to be a secret. So I replaced it with aromatic bitters. So my goal was to, no, no, I thought this out. My goal was to identify all the bad teams by whether or not they added aromatic bitters to their kit. So think about how do we inspect adhesives cause adhesives and envelopes and that kind of stuff, we generally have more of a drive. When we see them we can tell if it's been tampered with or not. So we look for cuts or tears or wrinkles, any distortion if it has lettering. We also wanna look at, has it changed place? Again, how far are you willing to go to look at this kind of stuff? Is the texture of it different? Is the gloss different? When you peel it up, is the adhesive the same strength? If it's supposed to leave a residue, does it? Does it leave it properly? Has it been altered? So there's lots of stuff. If you use, the bad part about solvents is that if you use the wrong one, you're probably screwed. So this is just an example of a ruined tape and you could see it just basically dissolves and leaves the security pattern behind. And if we look at this again, you could see it even flared out to the sides here so it's all covered in blue ink. If you use heat, if you use too much heat, it's pretty easy to ruin a lot of adhesives. So here's an example. One thing that a lot of solvents do is that they affect the gloss of the tape itself. Because generally speaking, you don't wanna put the adhesive on top of the backing. You want it between whatever it's stuck to in the adhesive because it doesn't really do you any good to have it on top of it because that's not what's holding it there. So if you get it on top, you might change the actual texture or gloss of the backing itself. You can also look even, as far as you want to get into this to look at, is it actually stuck? And when you peel it, does it feel the same? Does it look the same? So again, here's another example of heat with all the letters are all distorted and smeared. Big bubble marks. Let's say you use solvent and the solvent lifts the tape but it damages the adhesive so the adhesive doesn't work right. So you gotta add new adhesive, right? If you want it to look right. It's pretty difficult to do and you could see here's a photo of glue being stuck kind of around the edges from it being resealed. Here's an example of aerosol adhesive. So when you use aerosol, it's a combination of whatever the sticky stuff is and the propellant that actually makes it spray out. And here's a photo of all those little particles on the tape itself. And so that's obviously not normal because that's not how normal adhesives come. So the things I want you to take away from this talk are that there's lots more seals. There's hundreds of types of seals out there and little design variants that make certain attacks better or worse. There's always room to improve your methods of defeat. Everyone's leaving, geez. And so how do we improve our defeats? How do we improve more importantly our installation, our storage, our inspection methods? Because at the end of the day, you don't need to beat the tamper seal. You need to beat the people looking at them. And that's generally a much easier thing to do. And how do you integrate all this into whatever your business is? So don't think that you could just slap a sticker on and then it's gonna work. The hard part about it is that unless you're crazy like me, it's hard to evaluate CLA versus CLB and determine which one's better. And there's no real information on the internet about how to do this. So that's one of the goals of the contest that DT's running is starting this year. All the documentation will be a public wiki every year for the contest. So we do all our defeats, we type it up, and then once DEF CON's over, it all gets published to the internet. So you can look up this seal. Was this used in the contest? How do people defeat it? And what are ways that we can make it better and we could use it better in our business? So I wanna thank you all for coming. Are there any questions?


What is going on with Bulls management man? What is going on with Bulls management? Tell me what is go Jimmy Butler gone What is good? What Dan grows Jimmy Butler Crackers and soup that's what we're left with crackers and soup. We got who his last name is like three first names He better shoot man. He better be good at shooting one thing to say And it's to the Bulls management What the heck are you doing with my team? Just put me in the office man. How you gonna give up? I get it.  He's coming. Okay, cool. So get rid of Rose. I was already mark my heart was already broken and then Two years later when Jimmy's like at an all-star almost like MVP level you get rid of him, too And then you send them for Chris Dunn and Zach Levine They're great players. I get it. But for Jimmy Butler, you give him up for Chris Dunn Zach Levine and then you get a guy named Laurie Markonovan His last name is like three first names Like that's I don't know what to think Garpacks So the two managers What is what is your thought press? What is your thought process? You try to rebuild. Okay, so you want to get rid of somebody with the knee injury, right? Okay, I get that I was a little heard about that right my favorite player in the world, right other than Michael Jordan You get rid of then you get the way raid expect to you man respect to you Another guy with a knee injury and then you grab another got where the ACL tears at the beam Like like yo, I just don't know what to say.  I can wear this man And I got this jersey this year, man.  I'm stood. I gotta get rid of it I got to get a new one Jimmy Buller gonna be the new history in the new future Not new history is knowledge history the new future and like Dude, I I just have no clue what to think now man like I'm lost for words like Just watch this man. Like when I heard they're like, oh, okay. Oh There's a big trade going on Big trade going on and still Jimmy Butler. I was like, I was wearing my jersey. No Please don't be not great. He's going with his old coach time to do Dang it man. So I'm gonna say this. Hey tibble wolves. Y'all got I'm gonna go ahead and say you're gonna be a playoff You next year not only at Ricky Rubio. You got Jimmy Butler. You have Carl Anthony Towns.  Wiggins, but you got a squad And like I'm not trying to discipline I'm not trying to just done but what are you doing to our team if you're gonna try So we just we literally just got our 11th point card, right? We got Cameron Payne. We got Ray John Rondo We got Michael Carter Williams. We got Who else we got Jerry and Grant we got Denzel Valentine. How many good arms we need on our team nobody can shoot So we get one shooter Larry McConaughey And he's a rookie man boy. We also got Nico. I respect you Nico We got you and then earlier remember earlier in the year. We gave up Todd Gibson Doug McDermott So we're trying to rebuild but we gave away like the best shooter that we had right makes sense Not at all. So I'm gonna end this right by saying Look, I'm gonna see where we're at next year. See what moves we make. I know Dwayne's not gonna be happy Wade's like I stay here for Jimmy You know Rondo came here for Jimmy. So what we got to do now? I have no clue Jimmy's probably at home saying dang He's I don't want to go to cast. I'm gonna stay with the Bulls. So what what do the Bulls do? Oh, you don't want to go to cast we're gonna send you to the Timberwolves. See ya. Bye. Bye. What? Hey, anyway, I said best of luck to Jimmy respect to you man Bulls management Whatever you're smoking up there needs to stop. All right, y'all need to get our team back together We need to be back to the to the old school Bulls where we were feared feared for our defense fear for at home You know, like Thank man. Anyway Hope you guys enjoy I can't even say embrace the height man embrace them out of it. Oh raise the future the Bulls man. I See you


I've looked at Wario Land 2 and 3 in the past couple months, so let's keep going with Wario Land 4. The great thing about the Game Boy Advance is that it's essentially a portable Super Nintendo but with beefed up and more modern hardware. And Wario Land 4 is a perfect demonstration of that. This game looks, sounds, and plays like a mid 90's Super Nintendo platformer out of the same vein as something like Yoshi's Island. Fans of Wario Land 2 and 3 might be bummed out to learn that the 4th game plays a bit differently. This is much more of a traditional platformer. Wario has a heart meter and can take damage this time around, but don't worry, Wario's reactions are all still here, but the game just overall feels like a bigger, faster, more polished Wario Land. The first thing that stands out here are the visuals and sound.  And the music is unreal too, some of the songs actually have vocals. One key difference in Wario Land 4 is that the Wario sprite itself is a bit smaller and the wider Game Boy Advance screen allows for a more screen real estate. So this game definitely has a much different feel to it than previous Wario Land games. Everything moves much faster here and since this game is much more of a traditional platformer instead of a more deliberate puzzle solving game, it's further better. Wario Land 4 has the same kind of feel a Mario or Kirby game might have. Wario has a ton of abilities you can take advantage of, like his usual shoulder ram, in addition to a running charge, a butt stomp, and of course he can throw enemies as well. The level design is again up to the task of not only giving Wario plenty of opportunities to make use of these abilities, but to use them in unexpected and creative ways. I like this boss fight here where this inflatable bear floats up to the ceiling and you have to stop these spiky dudes and throw them at the bear that inflated a bit for it to come back down. There's lots of silly little touches here and there too, like Wario being too heavy for this flying carpet to carry him too far. One thing Wario Land 4 has in common with its predecessors is the overall structure.  I mean, there's so much stuff to collect here, it almost feels like I'm playing a new Super Mario Bros. game. But yeah, there's a ton of stuff to unlock, all sorts of goofy mini games like this weird home run Derby game for instance. This looks like something out of an Atari game. It's more amusing than anything else. But yeah, the structure here lends itself to be played out in multiple ways. It's a great 100% run game, or you can say screw it and just speed run straight through to the end, which is a pretty good challenge as well. If there's any flaws with this game, it's how the screen scrolls from top to bottom. There's some occasional blind jumps and falls, where the camera viewpoint doesn't scroll until you actually go down there. That can be frustrating at times. Also, while although Mario enemy reactions are back, there aren't any new ones. It's the same stuff from previous games, like Zombie Wario and Vampire Bat Wario. That's all kind of nitpicky stuff though. If there's one word to describe Wario Land 4, it's inspired. And that's kind of rare to say about a game that's the fourth in its series. This game got me so excited to play. It looks, feels, and plays like a classic Super Nintendo game. And like I said, the closest comparison I can give is Yoshi's Island. It's got that same bit of flexibility and style. I gotta say, one reason I branched out a bit to do reviews on Game Boy, NES, Genesis and Steam games was to find games that have that same high-energy colorful spirit with an open-ended functionality that certain SNES games have. And I can say I definitely found it here with Wario Land 4. This is easily one of the best Game Boy Advance games out there.


U.S. Preparing for Iranian retaliatory strike, American troops face constant threat. The White House has warned of the substantial threat faced by U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria amid a stream of threats issued by Iranian leadership in response to a suspected Israeli airstrike that killed several Iranian personnel last week near its embassy in Damascus. Addressing the warnings at a virtual press briefing, National Security Council Strategic Communicator's Coordinator John Kirby declined to go into specific intelligence matters but reiterated President Joe Biden's assurance that the Israeli government could count on the United States' support for any self-defense needs against threats directly by Iran to Israel, threats that Iran has made public, and discussed preparations for potential risks to U.S. personnel as well. Our own people, not just our troops, but our diplomatic personnel as well in Iraq and Syria are under constant threat, Kirby said. We take that seriously and we take the appropriate force protection measures we need to as the threat changes to make sure that they can protect themselves and that has not changed. That will not change. We're continuing to do that, but we take the threat to our people in our own facility seriously and we know that those groups, many of the groups that conduct those kind of attacks are supported, funded, resourced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is one of three primary branches of the Iranian armed forces along with the army which, like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, includes ground, naval, air and missile branches and the law enforcement force. Branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 2019, the IRGC and its elite Quds Force conduct operations abroad and coordinate with an international coalition of militias known as the Axis of Resistance, including in Iran and Syria. Such groups have targeted Israel and U.S. troops since the war in the Gaza Strip erupted six months ago between the Israel, the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinian Hamas movement and Israel has targeted Iran-aligned units in Syria as part of a years-long semi-covert campaign. Putin launches three-stage Ukraine war plan. He wants to turn this country into a lifeless conflagration. President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, ordered his army to seize Ukrainian cities after their destruction. To do this, the Russians have a three-stage plan. This was reported by the Czech edition of Actualny Spravodaisy. Russia launched a three-stage plan to seize Ukrainian cities after their preliminary destruction. The report reads the publication noted that the first stage is aimed at spreading panic among civilians to force them to flee. During the second phase, KAB bombs will destroy residential buildings and industrial infrastructure of Ukrainian cities. In the third stage, Russian troops will attack destroyed and abandoned cities. During March, the Russians used a record number of cabs more than 2,300. The production of three-ton FAB-3,000 bombs was also resumed. Journalists suggest that under certain conditions, Russians hypothetically can use up to 5,000 KABs per month. Such a scenario threatened Ukraine with catastrophic consequences. Millions of Ukrainians will be forced to flee to Europe, which will be on the verge of a migration crisis. The media said, Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing the ground for the largest humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine. Another important goal for the enemy is the destruction of Ukraine's energy infrastructure. The Russians consistently attack cities near the front of the border, Sumi Kharkiv, Nikopol, Nipro, Krivy Riy, Mykolaiv, Odessa, because the air defense system can't intercept all the missiles fired at close range. As a result, the maximum damage is caused to the energy infrastructure of the front-line cities. It is no coincidence that after these attacks, Russian propagandists began to write amicably that Ukrainians should flee Kharkiv, the city that suffers most from Russian cabs, the newspaper wrote. The media added that the resumption of production of FAB-3000 is an extremely alarming signal, since the enemy will be able to easily destroy densely populated areas, thermal power plants, logistics and factories. As the Russians advance, cab strikes will force Ukrainians to flee their settlements. Against the backdrop of international inaction, Putin wants to turn Ukraine into a lifeless conflagration, the journalists added.


Aloha everyone and welcome to Hawaii Together on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Kaylee Iakina, your host and president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Well, as you know, one of the issues we talk about at Grassroot a lot is how can we bring down the cost of housing in Hawaii for everyone? You know, there's a federal program that tries to answer that question by subsidizing builders to construct local affordable housing. Yet that program is very costly to administer and it has had a lot of programs with corruption and favoritism. Is that something we can make better or are there simpler ways to make housing less expensive? Those are some of the questions that I'm going to ask our guest today, a very special friend, Randall O'Toole. He's the president of the Thoreau Institute and a scholar for the Grassroot Institute. His expertise is something you're going to be amazed at as we open up some important questions. But first, let me welcome Randall to the program. Randall, you've been in Hawaii often, but welcome back via Zoom. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Well, you've got decades of experience working in forestry management and urban development. Your counsel here in Hawaii has been important to us on issues as wide-ranging as the environment and the rail. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how it is that you've gained such an interest in issues that are very important and relevant to us in Hawaii? Well, you're right. I actually started in forestry and I have a degree in forestry. And I started working on forest policy issues in the Northwest and I was invited to join, get a master's degree in urban and regional planning at the University of Oregon. And so studying urban regional planning, I quickly discovered that they were empirically barren. They based all their ideas on intuition and they were almost always wrong. And so I soon developed a strong critique of urban planning, including the idea that we need to make housing more expensive in order to get people to live right. Because supposedly people were living in the wrong way. And the path towards right living was forcing people out of single-family homes by making housing more expensive. And so ever since then, I've been a strong critic of urban land-use policies that are practiced in states all across the country as well as transportation policies. Well, we've appreciated your input here. You've certainly been a significant voice for the public as well as public officials. Now we talk about affordable housing in Hawaii all the time. It's a phrase that is used by virtually every politician when running for office and making promises to managing their terms. And yet affordable housing may be a misnomer because what often the government is working on is not necessarily affordable. What's the difference between affordable housing and housing that is actually affordable? Well, there's a lot of confusion between the terms affordable housing on one hand and housing affordability on the other hand. Affordable housing is basically housing that's subsidized for people who are so poor that they can't afford to buy or rent housing that's on the market. Housing affordability is completely different. It's a measure of whether housing is affordable to everyone in a market, not just low-income people. And so the standard way of measuring it is we compare the median price of homes against the median income, family income in a region. And if the prices are no more than three times incomes, then anybody can afford a home. Generally, there'll be a range of incomes where there'll also be a range in home prices. And so if prices are three times incomes, then the lowest income people can find a smaller or less luxurious house and the highest income people can find bigger or more luxurious houses. If prices rise and incomes don't, so that they're four or five times median incomes, they become less and less affordable. You can't afford to get a mortgage for a house that is five times your income. A bank will not lend you the money on a house that's five times your income unless you have a down payment that's equal to almost half the price of the house. So if housing is five times incomes, then housing is unaffordable. So what's happened is states like Hawaii have passed policies that have made housing unaffordable. This started with the 1961 land use law and it was followed by many amendments to that law and additions to that law that collectively have made housing less and less affordable. So that in 1969, the median home in Hawaii was less than three times the median income. Today, it's almost 10 times the median income, meaning very few people can afford to buy or rent a home in Hawaii. It's a real hardship on people. So instead of fixing the problem, instead of abolishing or amending the land use law, politicians say, well, we'll just subsidize some affordable housing. Well, that helps the few people who get those subsidies, but it hurts everyone else because oftentimes those subsidies are made at everyone else's expense. We have all kinds of taxes to pay for these subsidies. And so we drive the price of housing up and then the people who are hurt by this are hurt twice. First of all, because they have to pay more for housing. And second of all, because their taxes are increased to pay for the housing subsidies that politicians are proposing to use to remedy unaffordable housing. Affordable housing is not the solution to housing on affordability. The solution is to take care of what caused the problem in the first place. And by using affordable housing as a solution, we create an environment where developers are spending exorbitant amounts of money, because there's very little control over what they do in order to get affordable housing subsidies. And yet we're not solving the problem or actually making housing less affordable. Well, thank you, Randall. It looks as though in our pursuit of the Holy Grail of quote, affordable housing, unquote, we have actually made housing unaffordable for all. But let's take a bigger picture before I come back to Hawaii. Tell us a bit about the state of home building across America in general and where Hawaii fits into that picture. Well, Hawaii was the first state to pass a land use law that restricted the amount of land available to build new housing on that was in 1961. California passed a law in 1963 that ended up having the same effect, even though that wasn't the legislature's intention. In 1973, Oregon passed a law that was intended to have the same effect as Hawaii is it was intended to restrict the amount of land available for new housing. Washington State passed a similar law in about 1990. Florida passed a law like that in 1988. And several New England states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. And New Jersey and Maryland passed similar laws in the 1980s and 1990s. So what we see is. We have on the coast, the West Coast and the East Coast, particularly the Northeast and Florida. Have experimented with these laws, restricting housing. And most of the rest of the states don't have anything like it. You don't see anything like that in the Midwest. You don't see anything like that in the South, except for Florida, which incidentally repealed its law in about 2011. And you don't see anything like that in many of the Western states. So we have now a dichotomy. We've got these coastal states where housing has become really expensive. And then we have the central states where housing is more affordable. And so it's no surprise that we're seeing rapid growth in the more affordable states like Texas and North Carolina, which escaped passing any of those laws, even though it's on the East Coast. And meanwhile, people are migrating out of the states that passed those laws like California, Oregon and Hawaii. So we have this sharp contrast and it really is a good experiment because it shows that if you pass a law that restricts how much housing, new housing you can build. Guess what? It makes housing unaffordable. And except for in the Florida, politicians in these states have not said, maybe we need to repeal these laws.  What I hear you saying is that it's a simple matter of supply and demand, and that through our land use laws, we are creating conditions that restrict the supply. Would you say that's the cause of the apparent shortage of housing in Hawaii and its high cost? That's right. And you have to keep in mind that Americans want to live in single family homes. And so one of the remedies that planners have proposed is, okay, we've drawn these boundaries around our cities and we won't let anybody build new single family homes outside those boundaries. And we've filled up all the land inside the boundaries. So how are we going to get more housing? Well, the remedy they proposed is let's abolish single family zoning, tear down single family homes and build apartments on them on those lots. The problem with that is, as I say, Americans want to live in single family homes. So you reduce the supply of the kind of housing people want in order to increase the supply of the kind of housing people don't want. And you say, this is going to make housing more affordable, but no, it's going to make the kind of housing people want less affordable. And then it's going to produce perhaps an abundance of housing that people don't really want. There's another problem that high density housing tends to be more expensive to build, but that's a side of the point that people just don't want to live in that kind of housing. Randall, going back to the subject that I opened up with in my introduction, I made a reference to a low income housing tax credit program and wondered if you could clarify for us a little bit why that is not a very helpful program. All right, well, let's go back to the 1950s when Congress is giving money to cities to build low income housing and the cities are often using it to build high rise housing. And they were built by the government and then managed by the government and these high rise housing projects often failed miserably. As I say, people want to live in single family homes. They don't want to live in high rise housing. And particularly if your income is low, you build these high rise housing projects, they become magnets for crime. And so within a few years out of after building them, they found they couldn't give them away, they couldn't get people to live them at all and most of them outside of New York City were eventually blown up. So in 1986, we had Republicans running Congress and a Republican president, and they revised the tax code and among other things they said, maybe instead of having the government build low income housing, we should have the private sector do it. And, you know, believe in people believed in privatization and things like that. So it sounded very attractive. Let the private sector do it. What they should have said was, let's take away all government barriers to housing like or urban growth boundaries and restrictive zoning and rural areas and things like that and let builders build what they will build and that will make housing affordable. Instead, they said, what we're going to do is we're going to give builders tax credits. That is, they won't have to pay as much income taxes, and if they don't have any income taxes to pay, they can sell these tax credits to somebody else who won't have to pay income taxes because of the tax credits. And then we'll give the tax credits out to the states and right now it's about $10 billion a year in tax credits. Each state gets a share depending on their population and then the states hand them out to developers. Developers come up with proposals to build housing. They have to promise that a certain amount of that housing will be rented or sold only to low income people for 30 years. And then if their application is approved, they get a tax credit that can be used to build it. Now the states have added other housing subsidies and the federal government has other housing subsidies. And so oftentimes if you're a developer, you can build a project that gets 80 to 90% of its capital costs covered by tax credits and other housing subsidies, which means you put up very little of your own money. You build a big development. You're restricted as to what you can rent the units for or sell them if they're for sale. But since you put almost no money into it of your own, you still make an enormous profit on it. And that's how it works. We're seeing that happen and what it turns out is the private sector when it's given the same perverse incentives that face public housing authorities doesn't do that much better than the public did before. You know, that's a great explanation as to why we simply can't say private sector versus government, because even when government hands over a larger role for the private sector to play, it's got its tentacles of regulation wrapped around it. Now you've been looking at our specific situation here in Hawaii, and recently you filed an open records request with the Hawaii Housing and Finance Corporation. I think you were trying to find out how it's been spending its funds on affordable housing or what we call affordable housing. Now, Randall, that was back in July, I believe, of 2023. Have you gotten any results as the agency provided the information that you've requested? Yes, I've gotten a result and the agency basically denied my request. And the argument is that there are some kind of corporate secrets in the information I requested. And here's the situation. It turns out that the developers who are building so-called affordable housing end up spending, on average, twice as much money per square foot on that housing as it costs, if your cost was cost you if you hired somebody to build you a single family home. And so I wanted to find out why is it that so-called affordable housing costs twice as much as private housing? And the one way of answering that question is to look at the applications the developers submit to the housing authorities. These applications tell how many square feet are in the housing units, how much those housing units cost, which means you can calculate the cost per square footage. And it breaks down the cost into things like architects fees and consultant fees and construction costs and land costs and all sorts of other things. And then it also shows the applications also show what percentage of homes or of residences are going to be made available to people of different income levels such as 60% or 50% of median family income and what rents they're going to charge and who the actual developers are and things like that. So I don't see that there's any secrets in here. This is information that ought to be public information because it shows where our tax dollars are going. And while you can often look up and see what the total cost of a project is and how many square footed feet are in that project and then calculate that, oh yes, it's costing twice as much as a project if I were just going to hire somebody to do it for myself. Without getting the details that are in these applications, it's really hard to tell what is driving the cost. Why is the cost twice as much? I have some hypotheses, but I need to look at these applications to be certain. Well, I don't want to in any way cut short the due diligence that I know you are committed to in your research, but could you give us a little glimpse into some of your thoughts, some of those hypotheses as to why there is this price cost disparity. Well, the most important disparity that I've seen in other states, I've been able to look at these applications in Colorado and in Washington State and the projects I've seen in Oregon and California and Hawaii tend to follow the same lines. What's going on is that urban planners have decided that we should live in multi-family housing, especially housing that's on transit lines so that we will then instead of getting in our car and driving to work, we'll walk downstairs off of our apartment and then hop on a bus or a train to get to work. And they think this is a way of reducing climate change, but they were in favor of this long before climate change was an issue. They just think that Americans would be better off living in apartments. And for various arcane and totally absurd reasons, they have settled on the five-story apartment building as the optimum. Six stories is okay, four stories is okay, three stories is not so okay, four to five is really their optimum. The thing is, you build a two-story house and you basically build it out of wood.  If you build a five-story apartment building, you have to use a lot of steel. You have to have concrete separating each floor in order to provide fire shields so that if one floor catches on fire, it doesn't ignite all the other floors. You have to have a lot more steel to hold up all that concrete. Plus, Americans won't climb four flights of stairs to get to the top of the fifth story. And so you won't be able to rent those out unless you put it in an elevator. Elevators are really expensive. All of these things mean that the cost of five-story buildings per square foot is about twice as much as the cost of two-story houses. And so it's my hypothesis. And it seems to be verified looking at the applications I've seen in Seattle and in Denver. It's my hypothesis that these five-story buildings are the reason why so-called affordable housing costs so much. And one of the things that it says is we're handing out all of these tax dollars to people to build affordable housing and is being used very ineffectively. If it costs twice as much per square foot, they're only building half as many units as they could be building. And taxpayers should be upset about the ineffective use of it. Well, going back to the tax credit issue we were talking about, I'm sure that Hawaii is not alone in terms of the issues that you're looking into with regard to transparency and corruption. But beyond that question, the tax credit has been criticized for funding affordable housing units that cost much more than they should. Our own Senator Stanley Chang has raised similar questions about the program. What are your thoughts about that? Well, let me just give you an example. Recently, there was an article in a major publication in the New York Times or Washington Post or something like that. It said San Francisco has figured out the solution to affordable housing. And so they built a five-story building. And it had hundreds of affordable housing units, and they only cost $400,000 per unit. And they said previous ones that had been built in San Francisco cost $700,000 per housing unit. So that sounds like a great victory, reducing the cost per housing unit from $700,000 to $400,000. Well, looking up this project, I was able to determine that the average size of the housing unit in this project was 260 square feet. So $400,000 divided by 260 square feet is $1,500 a square foot. That's expensive even for San Francisco, where the average cost of construction is about $600 to $700 a square foot. So we're throwing money away, you know, letting it go down the drain in order to build so-called affordable housing units, and telling ourselves on the back by saying, you know, we're helping all these low-income people by squeezing them in to 250 or 260 square foot housing units. That's not socially just. That's not equitable. Especially not socially just to adopt policies that make housing really expensive and then combine them with policies that force low-income people into third-rate housing, third-rate in both the quality of the housing, the size of the housing, and the desirability of the housing. So we have socially, we are compounding socially unjust policies on top of other socially unjust policies. In a typical housing development, which was built using these tax credit funds, we were talking about it before, what are some of the rules for how long the affordable units must be rented at affordable rates? What if somebody wants to sell their project-built house to someone else? Well, generally, they often do sell them or they hire other people to manage them, but they are required to rent them at affordable rates for 30 years. Well, the affordable housing tax credits was created in 1986, so that means the first ones that were built are already well past that 30-year limit. So today, a lot of the ones we are building are not expanding the supply of affordable housing. All they are do is replacing other ones that have gone off the market because they've passed their 30-year limit. So it's become a case of running as fast as you can to stay in one place. Do these rules create a perverse incentive for property owners? I think the perverse incentive is created for developers. I think there's a small group of developers that focus on this kind of housing. One of the curiosities in the law is that 10% of the projects have to be run by nonprofit organizations. So we get massive nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity that are creating an aura of altruism as they spend huge amounts of taxpayer dollars. They just hire out other developers to build it, hire out other people to manage it. All they do is feed the money out, and it's very inefficient. Randall, what are the top reforms you would recommend for the tax credit program? Well, number one, if we're going to talk about housing affordability, we have to abolish the land use law. And then there will still be some people who can't find affordable housing, but the number will be a lot smaller than it is today. And let me just say that only about 14% of Hawaii is, only about 10% of Hawaii is urbanized. It's a little more in Honolulu and Oahu. The other three islands are mostly rural, so it's not like abolishing the land use law is going to lead to the entire island system being paved over. So we need to abolish that law. And then to provide affordable housing for the people who really need it, the way to do it is to forget about the developers, but focus on the people who need it and provide them with vouchers. We already have a program like that called Section 8 vouchers. It works pretty well. We don't need all these other programs or we're feeding developers and encouraging them to spend, you know, $500 a square foot on new homes when the private market is building them for half that cost. Well, I certainly hope we can look at those reforms and go even further as we move to a more rational understanding of how to make housing affordable. Randall, thank you so much for your thoughts today. Appreciate your hard work on behalf of the citizens of Hawaii. I look forward to chatting with you again. All right. Well, thank you very much and look forward to seeing you again sometime soon. Yes. And to my viewers, thank you for being here. You've been listening to Randall O'Toole, the president of the Thoreau Foundation, as well as a scholar at the Grass Root Institute. I hope you've enjoyed today's program. Until next time, I'm Kaylee Akina with the Grass Root Institute. You're watching Kauai together on Think Tech Kauai. Aloha.


Everybody forced here. I've been to 2021 NC football hobby four bucks full case number 138 random divisions Here are the results from the random. You can always find them late sports cards calm. Good luck everybody. Let's see what we got here You were here for the first place Blake. Well This guy You pulled the Mac and the Rodgers very good case You just need to focus on driving Seriously man driving on 436 Did it rain today? Yeah, I had no idea. I don't leave this room much man. I didn't get to see I didn't get to see Cole Did you even see him in the building like I turn around and saw him walk like over with like food or something That's pretty much all I saw Sometimes I have to watch the stream because I didn't see anything. All right, here we go. Here we go. Here we go. What do we have? We've got a treasured rookie Trouble hover to 99 NFC South guys CD lamb 30 of 35 NFC East Tremendous treasures Jersey card for the Rams NFC West Darryl Henderson to 99 other NFC West running back treasured patches Sean Alexander 82 of 99 AFC North framed fabric Joe burrow 45 of 99 Joe Shiesty Rookie dual patch for the NFC South Chiba-Hubert 7 of 49 on to the autos now NFC South rookie auto Pete Werner 33 of 35 Green Jersey number RPA Terrace Marshall, Jr. 56 of 88 NFC South nice car there NFC South 56 of 88 we'll get that magged next up is a Jack Lambert 32 of 49 on the auto for the NFC North AFC East Rookie material signature Zach Wilson 18 of 25 Congrats to the AFC East Michael N See what he can do when he comes back in a few weeks here I think we're all anxious to see nice one AFC East on the Zach Wilson rookie material signature silver That will for sure be in a bag box too. I Just wear a man the all just they all just Stay up late to troll Surprise illegal is not here saying the same sense of the similar Black corduroy Patterson three of 20 NFC South he will never leave my fantasy lineup again. I Made that mistake week one this year. I'm not making that mistake treasure the moments Mike Ditka 64 of 99 NFC North Patch car to Marcus Lawrence 27 of 49 NFC East who would have thought man if you were to start his career as a running back He'd be like a Hall of Famer right now Dual patch AFC North JK Dobbins 18 of 25 That is true Shane. You're very consistent. I will give you that. Oh my god. That is freakin Disgusting Sam would lose his mind right now Rookie dual patch AFC North Rashad Bateman. Oh my word Sunday treasures massive Raven's logos there the crest Good Lord AFC North this one's going to Matt M Just disgusting This might be the bottom of that patch Actually, no because the be it's totally different the bee you see like more than half the bee on both sides Holy cow, dude, that is sick Maryland patch with the Raven bee on it rookie Jersey card AFC East Zach Wilson 30 of 99 purple RPA AFC East Greg Rousseau 33 of 49 four color Greg Rousseau patch NFC South of a Matt Ryan auto 34 35. I won't tell him Shane Niners rookie dual auto Tray Lance Tray sermon 23 at 25. I Won't tell him I'll work with him tomorrow. I won't tell him And Javante Williams rookie glove signatures Broncos that is it Is that a glove? I guess it's a glove. I thought that'd be like a Yeah, I don't know what else it'd be. But yeah, it is glove. Obviously he says glove Yeah, our GS ready to go up signature 3 of 15 nice one Javante Williams Broncos. I've never seen that pattern on the glove before That's awesome, man, we'll get that mag. This is a great case so far Dude Sean's gotta tell you guys a story after Actually, you just tell it now. No, I was at the Walmart today and I seen Sam So as he was walking by me didn't see me. I went I said scrub and he Went to like look but he was like he just didn't want to look and he kept walking I was laughing because he looked like he was scared I'm like, I'm like, he turned around. He's like, oh, it's you like do happen. I get a little scared, buddy Sam Yeah, man, he looks lost in that place, too It's Walmart. Everyone's lost. Yeah Dominic Cook six of 30 Walmart is where we all go to find ourselves six of 35 NFC North Carson Palmer 57 99 AFC North Yeah Jersey card Josh Jacobs 89 of 99 AFC North So when you see him tomorrow I heard you were scared of Walmart, man Patch card Bill Romanowski 23 25 AFC West another burrow patch here AFC North one of 25 Not the frame fabric to There he is Mills mafia rookie Jersey card AFC South 68 of 99 Micah Parsons field pass 17 of 99 and there you go NFC East Looked like he's gonna contend for a defensive player of the year already man You go NFC East 17 of 99 get that magged NFC West Jersey auto Torrey Holt 19 of 25 Oh Another nice one here Tony Romo Jersey auto 69 of 99 NFC East and true RPA AFC North Najee Harris 29 of 99 now This is a really good all-around case Matt and with the AFC North Quite a few big hits so far Think Romo's coming back. There's no way he comes like he's been retired for like five four or five years now You're trying to what 2017 I Think it was because that was working in 16 Filled in from a remote tried to come back the next year And then like didn't make it like what out of the free season Cowboys are in dire need Koop rushes the answers How are you trying to say I? Mean they're just got to try and tread water and not lose a bunch of lose a bunch of games here the next month Cowboys are already on thin ice They're gonna have to have DAC have a good year to even you know win the division. I think and now without them. Oh boy No Gallup for a few more games as well Darren Waller 40 of 49 AFC North Goddard 42 and 99 NFC East Yeah, all you got to do is worry about Michael Parsons Jersey Card AFC North T Higgins 57 and 99 NFC East Jersey Michael Strayhand 8 of 25 Nice the Marj Jackson jumbo patch four colors for the AFC North 14 of 99 Triple Jersey AFC West Javante Williams Melvin Gordon Jamal Charles 31 of 99 AFC South rookie auto Tyson Campbell six of 25 Terris Marshall junior rookie jumbo prime signatures 42 of 99 NFC South Big three color patch. Oh, that's a nice patch patch auto NFC West Steve Larkins 20 of 25, although That's gotta be what yeah player worn because that patch was not around back then NFC West and again AFC East rookie dual relic auto Zach Wilson 8 of 25 Michael and two Wilson's in the break congrats Three color patch and a two color patch. All right one second.  All right triple relic AFC West Javante Melvin Gordon and Jamal Charleston 99 jumbo patch the Marj Jackson 14 of 99 AFC North Jersey card Michael Strayhand NFC East 8 of 25 AFC North T Higgins patch 57 99 Davis Mills rookie Jersey 68 of 99 AFC South Joe Burrow 125 jumbo patch AFC North AFC West Josh Jacobs patch card AFC West Roman Aske patch AFC East Ricky Jersey Zach Wilson to 99 AFC North Sunday Treasures JK Dobbins to 25 to Marcus Lawrence NFC East patch card of 49 dual patch to be hovered NFC South to 49 Pete Warner rookie auto NFC South have a good one shame. We'll see you tomorrow man. Hopefully Jersey card Joe Burrow AFC North Shawn Alexander AFC West Darrell Henderson a NFC West NFC West was Alexander and Henderson patch auto Steve Larkins a NFC West Tizen Campbell rookie auto AFC South to 25 NFC West again Jersey auditory Holtz NFC East 20 Romo Jersey audit to 99 Matt Ryan auto to 35 NFC South Gregory so purple RP 8 of 49 AFC East Jack Lambert AFC North auto to 49. We had the Terrace Marshall Jr. Ricky jumbo prime signatures booked to 99 for the NFC South Another terrace Marshall Jr. Was green Jersey number RPA 56 of 88 rookie gloves signatures to Vonte Williams 3 of 15 at AFC West Dual patch for shy Bateman 2 out of 10 NFC or AFC North on the Sunday Treasures Field pass Ricky Otto Micah Parsons 17 of 99 NFC East true RPA Najee Harris 29 of 99 Steelers AFC North Lance and Sermon Ricky dual auto to 25 NFC West Ricky dual patch auto Zach Wilson 8 of 25 AFC East and Ricky Mato signature silver Zach Wilson AFC East 18 of 25 good stuff man. That'll do it personals up next


This year, the furtive investigative support sub-directorate decided to run Operation Hydra. It is a global fugitive operation based on the model of Operation INFRA. Operation INFRA stands for International Fugitive Roundup and Arrest. This year Operation Hydra targeted the fugitives wanted for Pible Smuggling. That was our main target. In the framework of Operation Hydra we managed to bring 28 officers from 24 different countries, που were source, transit or destination countries. We worked altogether at the CCC room of Interpol General Secretariat and we managed to work at around 180 cases of fugitives wanted for this serious crime of people smuggling. In the framework of Operation Hydra we managed to arrest around 20 fugitives so far. Now we are at the specific point that we ask, we seek the public assistance in order to give more information to the investigators. Public can play a crucial role to this and that's why we are asking your support to go on.