I just went for an interview for a job for an engineer for an insurance company.

The guy in charge asked me,"OK, so what do you know about resource adjusting?"

I did a double take and nearly answered,"Only what I know from my Johnson." But thankfully I didn't.

Does anyone have similar experiences in real life?

Well since I snuggle up regularly with a policeman I get to hear all the neat stuff he finds

Not personally, but I do keep making notes about day jobs runners could have without conflicting with an active nightlife.

-Siege

I was browsing the US Embassy in France for a completely different matter, I found

Closest thing I can think of is a friend of a friend of mine who used to run a very popular hacker-type website. It was basically a search engine, some basic Hacking 101 type texts, and a few personal political rants all marketed to the poser hacker population. Dude pulled down a six figure salary from that website and he didn't have to lift a damn finger, just from banner ad revenue. Work an hour a week and make $3000 or so a week. Now he rents out the domain name for $15,000 a month.

There's also "freelance security experts", mostly in the computer areas but some also do physical security. Basically, they test the security of a company's computer system (the others test computer and physical security) by breaking in, then they give the company notes on how they can improve their security. The film SNEAKERS with Robert Redford is a movie-world example of this type of firm. Generally, the physical security type are former law enforcement types, and the computer security types are former hackers, some of which have convictions for hacking crimes. A few big-name hacker groups have gone legit doing this sort of work.

It's weird though. You do this kind of work and charge for it, and you're a valuable asset to the corporate world. You do it and don't charge, you're a menace who must be stopped. I don't know if any of you remember a group called CDC (Cult of the Dead Cow) and their program Back Oriface offered free on the net. It was a remote-access tool that allowed you to perform commands, install programs, change settings, etc. over the internet or another network so that you didn't need to be physically at the terminal. Many companies attempted to do everything but directly sue the company for making a "hacker exploit tool". Less than six months after Back Oriface came out (offered as freeware), Microsoft came out with a fancy boxed program for $300 that did the same exact damn thing. Now it's an intrigal part of the Windows XP operating system. Fun, ne?

The Abstruse One

One of my software engineering professors used to work for an arms developement company. Oh so many shadowrun inspiring stories. He once said corporate espionnage is very prevalent, and he heard of one case where a guy used special shoes to walk around during a tour, and trace pieces of metals would stick to the shoes. The other company would then analyse the metals from the shoes, and that would give them knowledge of what was being done.

I know a Shadowrun player who's actual job was "freelance corporate security."

I don't doubt for a second this stuff goes on. I know of someone personally (not a friend of a friend. I know the chap, although I concede he could be lying) who was paid by one company to hack another and get a particular chemical formula from them. That job is what paid to get him through college and get his IT degree so he could go get legit work.

And never mind all the 'tragic accidents' which happen on a regular basis to high profile people (no, I'm not saying they're all hits, I'm just saying the frequency is a little higher than you'd expect), the regular corporate espionage going on in plain view and dressed up as conferences, shows, or 'gaining new understandings with our competitors' and (I'll probably get flak for this) the whole US government/corporate sponsorship thang. You guys have a legitimised system of bribes to make government work for heaven's sake, and when you think about the sums of money involved its not a short step to active sabotage, public relations deviousness and so on...

never mind the various political parties (not just talking about US now) who employ 'opposition strategy analysts' during elections - their job is purely to dig up sleaze and find ways to rubbish opponents' campaigns for crying out loud! If that's not shadow work I don't know what is because you can bet your shiny new Predator III that they don't use legit means in order to get that data.

Yeah, this stuff goes on. Lets all just be glad that mainly it doesn't happen to us. The scary thing is how much of it is completely legitimised and accepted as standard 'dirty tricks', even though much of it must be horribly illegal. Its the fact that nothing can be proved or traced back to the offenders that makes it shadow activity, even if its a corp using its own personnel and resources to do it. When you define it like that, you can see that shadowrun teams and roles already exist - they just aren't independents as often as they are in SR!

Defense witness in Martha case dies

I'm not saying anything else

Too bad freckles cannot show puncture wounds...

I rest my case.

It's hardly a phenomenon limited to the US -- although the line tends to blur between corporate espionage and good, old-fashioned spying.

In a world driven by "competitive advantage", corporate espionage and similar "dirty tricks" are just another tool of the trade.

-Siege

If you want government/corporate connections, have a look at France. AFAIK, the government is actually a shareholder in several large defence corporations and a myriad others. Leads to a lot of cross-over from what I've heard.

I work in Information Systems Security for Uncle Sam. I imagine if I used my work experience for a run, it would go something like this:

"Okay, you go through the metal detector, it goes off. The guard waves his wand over your metal belt buckle and lets you pass, totally missing the gun stashed in the small of your back. You need to get access to the network. Okay, you call a random number, say you're from ITD and need their password... Alright, you got it. Now you need to find a terminal. Oh, the receptionist left the terminal on, unlocked and you can hear her chatting it up with a friend two cubicles over..."

Makes me want to cry : (

Don't worry too much... I they don't check me really well because every single day my boots make the alarm go off, and I have the Friendly Face edge. Plus, there isn't a single classified document in the building.

That martha stewart link? Its dead. Co-incidence...?

Yeah, I expect so, I haven't even googled for it...

I work in criminal law, and whilst I get the 98 percent of idiot drug addicts and general low-intelligence criminals, I do occasionally run into an interesting matter.

One example was a professional break and enter guy, who got caught by sheer blind luck (he breaks into a private school and gets caught by the janitor coming to the school to go to a single classroom and walking into the specific room he's hiding in because a teacher made the janitor come in and feet the fish in the fish tank on a weekend). He co-operated fully with police, including a whole lot of fascinating details about how he breaks into places (not just using glass cutters on windows, but things like using a sort of shotgun mike to find out the location and type of ultrasound motion sensors).

Another example was a professional hit man, who killed a guy by knifing him very expertly in the back (between ribs straight into the kidney), the heart (angled up under the sternum with a long knife, apparently) and then slit his throat, and was in and out of the house in about a minute. He then goes and runs a couple of errands, and waits at home for the police (he's known to them). The police turn up smugly and say "we have a witness who says someone matching your description wearing clothes X and Y was seen in the area of a crime - care to comment?". The guy says "my, what a co-incidence, I own clothes just like that, please take them for analysis". The police open his closet and he owns five pairs of exactly that type of clothing, right down to the shoes. They test the clothes - no blood. They search the house for a knife - no knife. The guy is a vietnamese guy wearing generic clothes at night, but they take him in for interrogation and he lawyers up immediately. They talk to his neighbours - they all say he drives a massive muscle car that wakes them up every time he leaves, and the car didn't leave the house. End result - strong police suspicion, no charge that can proceed. The guy vanished a month or so later.

But the coolest character idea/SR crossover thing is the police from the Surveillance Unit who do incursion warrants. This entails going to a suspect premises (generally drug labs or something similar), planting bugs, taking photos and taking samples etc. However, they all have a freaky memory, because it is well known that drug lab people will do things like line up papers in a specific way on a table to test whether someone comes in over night, or screw the lid on a container a specific number of times, to test whether it's been opened. So they sneak in with fast response officers armed heavily waiting just outside, bypass the normal security measures (cameras, motion sensors etc), bypass the special filled-with-love drug dealer security measures (live snakes loose in the place, man-traps with such power as to sever an ankle, etc) and do the job so that no-one knew they were there. That's cool

Goodbye, thread. Good shot, Solstice; almost certainly a kill. Excellent flaming.

~J

In the interests of promoting good international relations, I feel that I should point out that Solstice's opinions are not representative of those of all, or even necessarily most, Americans.

Echo that.

Socialist? I am not sure Princess Tony ever even pretended to be socialist, he was a Thatcherite from the start. (which is odd, since they technically belonged to opposite camps)

And the whole IRA thing; we put up with what, 80 years of it? You think joking about the WTC is bad, trust me when I say that the IRA wins on body-count. We have a lot of practice when it comes to dealing with terrorists, and the psychological effects of paramilitary organisations wanting to hurt us because of where we were born.

/em puts the final nail in the coffin...

edited out flame

the irish people had every right to do what they did to get their freedom from the english, and as far as the provos go, might not have been the best course of action but they got the good friday agreement and if itworks history will vindicate them, for i fear we will never know if ireland without the troubles would ever lead to a unified 32 counties, but it looks like ireland with them will.

sometimes its not terrorism, its freedom-fighting

Erased, gone to PMs.

Just a friendly suggestion, let's get back on topic. I have strong feelings, with all I have seen, but this is not the place to discuss them.

I know a group of British ex-Royal Marine Commandoes and ex-SAS fellas who now run a company that provides "hostile environment training" to civilians. It's geared toward journalists and the like heading into nasty places (such as the Middle East), where they might get shot at, etc. I went through the course a couple months before Gulf War II, with a bunch of folks from MSNBC. It was enlightening, to say the least, and it certainly gave me a lot of new insights on combat/clandestine ops/etc.

Anyway, to get to my point, I could certainly see a group of ex-Shadow folk doing the same thing - opening a company to provide training to corpers who have to work in the Barrens, or the Wilderness, or what have you. Or...to be devious, a group of runners could use such a company and its activities as a front to their actual shadowy business. Who ever said "retirement" was permanent?

What exactly did the course entail? This interests me.

A lot of it was awareness/precautionary stuff - how to keep an eye out, what should strike you as suspicious/dangerous, etc. A lot of little things that you wouldn't normally think of, such as how to present your body language to possible threats, etc. There were bits on what to do if you get stopped at a checkpoint, things like that, how to bribe people relatively safely, etc.

Also we learned a lot of emergency/improvised first aid and medicine. They didn't make any pretense at teaching us combat-type techniques in such a short time, but the point of the course was sort of to make it so that you wouldn't need combat techniques, by avoiding trouble and having ways of solving it without violence if you did encounter it.

There is also several ex special forces guys in the US providing services/training related to anti-piracy tactics for export companies etc etc.

France is also in the process of becoming a major owner of Alstom, maker of numerous things, they are part of the conglomerate that built the Acela "high speed trains" on Amtrak as well as rebuilding and building locomotives for freight and passenger railroads, and passenger cars here in North America, Brazil and France, and presumably other places as well, I just don't know them.

Thanks for the info. once it was fairly well assured that the local plant (hornell ny) wasn't going to close, it kinda dropped off the local news media, and I wasn't interested in following the story.