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Death in Singapore

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Re: Death in Singapore

#81

Post by Matti »

Not the first death of that kind in Singapore:

"Family suspects interference in David Widjaja case"

http://sgforums.com/forums/3317/topics/363855

"However, it appeared the court process was intentionally directed to a conclusion of suicide despite evidence showing a strong possibility of murder, according to David's family and the verification team.

"We have strong evidence that he was murdered but that fact was not brought up in the court," David's father, Hartono Wijaya, told a press conference Tuesday at the National Commission on Human Rights."

[...]

"He added there was a suspicion David's death was related to his research: "Multiview Acquisition from Multi-camera Configuration for Person Adaptive 3D Display".

"His friends said his three-dimensional study could be used for various purposes, either for entertainment or even for military needs."

"And we must not forget that after David's death, there were two unusual deaths at NTU - his professor's assistant *committed suicide' four days later and another researcher was hit by a car 25 days later.""

EDITED: Having read more about the specific case, it seems to me that the official story sounds plausible enough. It's not at all clear whether there was foul play involved.

Re: Death in Singapore

#82

Post by steve-howard »

varunkho wrote: post #67
creamyhorror wrote: post #16

This story is all over my FB wall. Rest assured there are many concerned Singaporeans listening, and it'll be harder to ignore this case now that the FT has brought it to the world's attention. I'd like to hear the IME and police's side of the story, though - hopefully a higher body will conduct a proper investigation to settle the facts and determine motives. We rarely get serious cases of cover-ups being exposed, s…

wondering why didn't the person possibly looking/cleaning the evidence from the harddrive take it with him in the first place? Isn't Suspense theory indicating something deeper? > Hours later, in the middle of the night, someone went into Shane’s hard drive and accessed five folders, all labelled IME. ... Since the time of Shane’s death is uncertain, Massoud could not say who looked at the IME files. > But Massoud fo…

It's possible that his laptop, with the external hard drive, was accessed remotely, and that the "speaker" was simply removed by the police when they took the laptop. If it was on a corporate network (as it would be if he used it to back up data) then they might well have been exposed to some form of corporate spyware. Of course, we can't know with the computer under wraps.

Re: Death in Singapore

#83

Post by contingencies »

rdl wrote: post #75
contingencies wrote: post #30

Fellow hackers: stay away from anything connected to the defence industry. Security might be fun, it might pay well, but the ethics are terrible, things get used for bad purposes, and you can easily lose your freedom or worse.

I'm quite comfortable in defense. There are good reasons to avoid doing direct operations contracting for the USG (bureaucracy, inefficiency, etc.), but if you can just sell products, it's fine. The USG doesn't tend to assassinate its contractors.

Some might see that as a bit of a head-in-sand perspective; ie. one that conveniently avoids considering the onward effects of one's actions. You could equate it to the situation vegetarians often encounter, ie. people that say eating meat is OK because the animal is dead already, or because it was farmed to be food, or some such. In such cases, the animals are farmed and killed (often under horrible conditions) because some people pay to fund that industry by buying the meat and others work within it as butchers, cattlemen, industrial vets, transport operators, cleaners, accountants, etc. to facilitate the scale and depth of suffering imposed upon the animals. Similarly, working in an industry based around killing, torturing, pressuring, wounding, imprisoning, spying, and other negative activities targeted at human beings also directly contributes to those activities.

One perspective on this type of activity is that of early Buddhism, which 2500 odd years ago summarized that one should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison. — AN 5.177 http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma...

Re: Death in Singapore

#84

Post by Jplenbrook »

creamyhorror wrote: post #16

This story is all over my FB wall. Rest assured there are many concerned Singaporeans listening, and it'll be harder to ignore this case now that the FT has brought it to the world's attention. I'd like to hear the IME and police's side of the story, though - hopefully a higher body will conduct a proper investigation to settle the facts and determine motives. We rarely get serious cases of cover-ups being exposed, s…

I see why you never "get" them. It looks like they are pretty good at covering up.

Re: Death in Singapore

#85

Post by varunkho »

steve-howard wrote: post #82
varunkho wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wondering why didn't the person possibly looking/cleaning the evidence from the harddrive take it with him in the first place? Isn't Suspense theory indicating something deeper? > Hours later, in the middle of the night, someone went into Shane’s hard drive and accessed five folders, all labelled IME. ... Since the time of Shane’s death is uncertain, Massoud could not say who looked at the IME files. > But Massoud fo…

It's possible that his laptop, with the external hard drive, was accessed remotely, and that the "speaker" was simply removed by the police when they took the laptop. If it was on a corporate network (as it would be if he used it to back up data) then they might well have been exposed to some form of corporate spyware. Of course, we can't know with the computer under wraps.

> But Massoud found activity, again, on several more IME files on the night of June 27, three days after Shane’s body was found. He said someone looked at IME folders – including one labelled “Supervisor” and one labelled “Goal Setting” ... One file in particular was opened and closed but closed improperly so that a “shadow” file was created. That shadow file was then deleted by the same person. Massoud located the original file on the drive – it was a PowerPoint presentation of the “Layer structure and summary of Veeco grown HEMT wafer”. This contains the scientific formula – a specific recipe – for enhancing a GaN chip. “In that two-minute window, someone is perusing. Something is happening. And it’s not automated, it’s a person.”

Certainly harddrive is again manipulated long after it had been detached from the laptop by police.

Re: Death in Singapore

#86

Post by crdoconnor »

miked wrote: post #77
VexXtreme wrote: post #39

Sounds like a classic case of corporate murder. In the cozy world of web startups, we engineers have an incredible amount of freedom and control over our lives and what we do... but megacorps and companies connected to the defense/war industry are known for treating their engineers as fungible resources that can easily be disposed of once they get the job done. Sounds like something out of a hi-tech Tom Clancy spy no…

>> Sounds like a classic case of corporate murder. No, it sounds like a case of Chinese government murder, something they have plenty of experience with. They must have known that there was a good chance that he would talk to the US government. The more interesting aspect is that the IME, a agency of the Singaporean government, would appear to be in on at least the suppression of the story.

To a policeman the explanation is always fairly simple. Murder's not common in Singapore, especially not 'corporate' murder but suicide is.

Re: Death in Singapore

#87

Post by JumpCrisscross »

homosaur wrote: post #76
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in any industry in Pakistan or Nigeria (both #139 on the Corruptions Perceptions Index) is probably going to be more life-threatening than working for the Danish, Finnish, or Kiwi (tied for #1) defence establishments.

It may be relatable at extremes like you mentioned, but I'd have to see more evidence of a direction relationship between corruption and safety. Of course countries with little to no government will be more corrupt on some NGO's index.

Observing the 2012 Corruptions Perceptions Index scores [1] and the latest year United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime intentional homicide rates [2], one finds an an exponential relationship between the two with an intercept (homicide rate per 100 000) of 19.9, slope of -0.033, and regression coefficient of 0.25 (N=176). See chart [3].

Murder is the most vivid example without adjustmenting for income, but one can trace similar patterns across ambulance response times, food quality, transport efficiency, etc. Transparency International's report on their metric is a good starting point.

[1] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/

[2] http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/...

[3] http://imgur.com/a1N5WXm chart!

Re: Death in Singapore

#88

Post by jacques_chester »

vellum wrote: post #74
jacques_chester wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And just look at how successful those "free countries" have been in addressing those categories of crime! The crime rate in Western countries, including the US, has been falling steadily since the 90s. Given the differences in cultures and legal frameworks ... nobody is really certain why.

One theory that's been gaining some attention is less lead = less crime. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

That's one I've seen. But there are quite a few -- long period of economic growth, the rise of video games, changing diets, changing weather, changing incarceration rates, changing police policy ...

Re: Death in Singapore

#89

Post by buster »

homosaur wrote: post #53
buster wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd describe Singapore strict laws just as effective and strict but in exchange you get a very safe and clean country, no drugs, no garbage, no theft. That's ok with me if (and only if) those laws are not exploited by the government. i don't think this is really the case in Singapore, at least not more then in the U.S. or european countries. Compared to the surrounding countries Singapore is like _the_ safe place and…

I don't think their laws are necessarily brutal, but their enforcement of those laws is. They view people who break the taboo of law as people who should be handled with the full force of the state. And personally I like drugs.

Ah well, just because you like the "freedom" of doing illegal things and the reassurance that if you're caught there will be virtually no consequences, doesn't make it right.

There are people out there that say "And personally i like to beat my wife and kids" and there are societies where this is accepted behaviour.

After being in Malaysia and Indonesia i felt very safe in Singapore and had not the impression of a state the oppresses its people.

In short words: Every country has its rules to live by. Singapore may have strict laws but gains a lot in terms of overall safety.

Re: Death in Singapore

#90

Post by Confusion »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #64
contingencies wrote: post #30

Fellow hackers: stay away from anything connected to the defence industry. Security might be fun, it might pay well, but the ethics are terrible, things get used for bad purposes, and you can easily lose your freedom or worse.

Shane Todd worked for the IME, a globally regarded research organisation based in a country that scored higher in the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index than the U.S. (87, #5 versus 73, #19) [1]. If he worked for the defence industry then so would an Oracle engineer deployed at Northrup Grumman or a SpaceX engineer in competing with Lockheed Martin. [1] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/

Lower corruption just means nobody risks their neck for relatively small amounts. For higher prices most are still for sale. If they offered the officers involved the equivalent of $50K each to cover it up, then it doesn't matter whether it's Germany, the US or Singapore: there is a reasonable chance they would succeed. And if a government (and Huawei, like any other Chinese company, is basically Chinese oligarchy/government property) is involved, money is not a problem.
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