Rodney Monroe Candidate for Police Chief; also being investigated

Posted in the Charlotte Forum

Thursday Jul 17

Dr. Trani and VCUs Board Of Visitors had the option after their internal investigation into Rodney Monroe’s Degree qualifications to correct the ‘error’ as they stated that Monroe was issued a degree at the university that was not appropriately earned at VCU. Their failure to correct this ‘error’ as they put it, is shameful and harmful to all VCU students and grads who all had to comply with the very well published rules of requirements to earn a degree at the university. Even the website clearly states that it is the student’s responsibility to be aware of what requirements are in place and qualifications necessary to earn a degree at VCU. It does not include taking only 1/5 of the required classes everyone else has to take to establish residency at the college. Minor exceptions are allowed for life experience or business experience, but for a university to allow and then continue to support awarding a degree when the holder only took 2 classes at the university is unconscionable.

If he has the credits, then his degree should say University of Phoenix, not VCU. Furthermore, he doctored his resume for the Chief of Police application in Charlotte by claiming his degree was in criminal justice. It was not, it was an ‘interdisciplinary studies’ or, a generic degree which is only supposed to be offered according to VCUs rules/guidelines if a student needs a curriculum NOT otherwise offered. Criminal Justice is a legitimate course of study at VCU and apparenlty that is what Monroe wanted to claim to have earned.

Furthermore, he’s being investigated as to why he reportedly broke the rules regarding City of Richmond tuition reimbursements to University of Phoenix and VCU. Allegedly he put his tuitions on a city credit card in full in advance of all classes. The rules say employees must front the monies for courses and be reimbursed up to a stated limit per course or semester upon successful completion, meaning probably earning a C or better.

Charlotte should have suspended the search process for the Police Chief temporarily while this was going on if Monroe at the time was high up in the running. Furthermore, upon doctoring his resume (which he has publicly admitted as ‘another mistake’) and by VCUs admission that his degree was issued in ‘error’ he should have been released from his duties.

If Monroe wanted to stand up as a real man he would ask University of Phoenix to grant him a degree at that school and return VCUs degree.

Students and recent graduates at VCU are in an uproar over these actions by one highly public individual and the school’s failure to correct it’s ‘error.’ They are asking for refunds, initiating transfers and asking certain upper officials step down. Rightfully so. The school is being investigated by its accreditation authority and it would be a tragedy for all if VCU loses accreditation or is heavily sanctioned for the lack of action in correcting the Monroe degree issue.

VCU is a fine university and many people have worked very hard towards the recognition VCU deserves. It’s a terrible shame that the actions of a few have created this event and bad publicity for the college, and that they, knowing accreditation is on the line, failed to act appropriately on behalf of the university and its students to correct the ‘error.’

MY THOUGHTS:

Emiel Fisher, PI, PPS

The following article came from a BLOG response regarding the x-Chief of Police for the City of Richmond, Virginia, RODNEY MONROE, who left Richmond for the same job in Charlotte, North Carolina a few months ago.  I live in a county surrounding Richmond and was interested in seeing how the education thing played out.  It seems that Mr. Monroe walks both sides of the “I am an idiot and also a liar” fence, of course, only when it suits his needs.  He (cliché) claims he “thought” he had all of the required hours and dumped his bogus request in the laps of Virginia Commonwealth University for his degree.  Let’s just cut through the crap here and say he knew he didn’t have the required courses, but was looking for a sweetheart deal, which the VCU upper crust granted to him for reasons of idiocy because it was text book fraud.

There is an old phrase I use every now and then when speaking of corrupt government employees and political scum and that is “Caesars Wife” which means basically, “above reproach, beyond suspicion”.  Mr. Monroe being the Chief of Police should learn this phrase and follow suit.  If he is using the degree VCU granted him through fraud to get jobs, then I believe this speaks volumes about the man’s character, ethics and morals and that’s all I am going to say about that.

I should say that I DID graduate from VCU with a degree in Criminal Justice in 1985 and I new exactly how many credit hours I had at any given time.  I didn’t pay for it with the City of Richmond’s credit card (I worked at the City Jail, graveyard shift) I paid for it through work and loans all of which I paid back personally.

I don’t know what Dr. Trani (President of VCU) was thinking when he Ok’ed giving Monroe his degree even after being informed that Monroe didn’t qualify.  All he did was set back a school, and a degree program and spit in the face of every student who worked hard, followed the rules, and graduated with a degree they cherished as unique.  It is not Monroe who should be looked at here so much as the people calling the shots at VCU.  Monroe was just doing was a lowlife does and that is cheat the system if they think they can get away with it.  Trani heard what happened and could have done the right thing and taken the degree back.  No one would have blamed him.  But he didn’t, he showed himself to be gutless and propitiate a wrong and this I find much more disturbing.  In sports and life one learns that no one person is bigger than the game itself.  Trani, by his decision has stated that Monroe is bigger than the City of Richmond, the people of Richmond and the students past and present at VCU and is above remand.  This is truly SAD.

Spying Chinese temptress steals senior Brit’s BlackBerry

SPECIAL REPORT
Analysis: Spying Chinese temptress steals senior Brit’s BlackBerry
By David Gewirtz

Oh boy! Here we go again. Another senior government official has had his BlackBerry stolen by another foreign intelligence agency. But this time, it’s not an American official. According to the U.K.’s The Sunday Times a senior aide to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had his BlackBerry stolen by Chinese intelligence agents while on a trip to China back in January.

The story gets particularly juicy because the senior Downing Street aide got caught in what’s probably the world’s oldest intelligence ploy, the “honeytrap”. No, I’m not talking about the rock band from Coventry, I’m talking about an intelligence scam where a particularly hot woman is used to lure a particularly horny guy into some form of compromising position.

In the case of our bollocksed-up British horndog, he was approached by a Chinese woman while in a Shanghai hotel disco. He agreed to return to his hotel with the woman — and the next thing we know is he reported the BlackBerry missing to the Prime Minister’s Special Branch protection team the next morning.

According to another unmentioned senior Brit official, the incident had “all the hallmarks of a suspected honeytrap by Chinese intelligence.”

Karl Rove’s missing BlackBerrys
The intelligence risk of lost BlackBerry’s first came to our attention when I reported that former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove had lost his BlackBerry device more than once in Where Have All The Emails Gone?.

At the time I wrote the book, the intelligence risk was merely a scenario. As I wrote the scenario, a BlackBerry accidentally got left in a hotel room, to be stolen by a maid with ties to terrorist organizations.

My first draft actually had the BlackBerry stolen by a hooker who’d picked up a senior White House official, but because I wanted to spotlight the security risk and not get everyone hung up on the idea of a White House official with a hooker, I changed the scenario to use a less controversial thief.

And yet, life imitates art.

The Mexican theft of U.S. government BlackBerrys
Back in April, I reported that Rafael Quintero Curiel, lead press advance person for the Mexican delegation, was caught stealing BlackBerry devices belonging to White House staffers who were attending meetings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian and Mexican leaders in New Orleans.

My detailed analysis showed:

• How one of the nightmare scenarios I wrote about in the book has now come true with almost freaky precision.
• How this isn’t just a cautionary tale for the U.S. government, but for businesses and individuals as well — and, as we’ve now seen, other governments across the world.
• How the scope of the security risk is bigger than it might seem. For example, if Quintero Curiel had stolen paper documents instead of BlackBerrys containing the digital equivalents, he’d have to haul 166.8 pounds of U.S. government information back to Mexico.
• How those BlackBerry devices could have contained anything. They could have home addresses of relatives of key U.S. officials. They could have pictures of their kids. They could have passwords, access codes, phone numbers, directions to evacuation locations.
• How it happened. I explored the scene of the crime and also explores the issue of whether Rafael Quintero Curiel was merely a diplomatic functionary or an agent under diplomatic cover.
• How, because of the unfortunate perceptions many Americans have of Mexicans, this act is being treated more as a joke than as a serious security breach by both press and the blogger community.

Compromised BlackBerry as possible surveillance device
What I didn’t discuss was what might have been put onto the BlackBerry’s while Curiel had them in his hands. There’s software (I won’t mention where to get it, but it’s an easy, cheap download off the Internet), that can turn a BlackBerry (and most other smartphones) into a mobile surveillance system.

Supposedly designed to allow husbands and wives to keep an ear on cheating spouses, the software, once installed on the phone, is undetectable. It allows the spy to hear everything that the phone’s microphone can pick up, it allows the spy to undetectably listen in on phone coversations, and it allows the spy to get copies of every email sent and received by the device.

The stolen Mexican BlackBerry’s were returned to their owners after being recovered by the U.S. Secret Service. But, when the Secret Service got the devices back, did they do a full, bare-metal wipe of the devices, or did they just return them to their owners?

If they didn’t do a bare-metal wipe, is it possible that White House staffers, walking around in the presence of Presidential-level discussions, are transmitting those discussions to someone in Mexico — or elsewhere?

And there was my worry: what if there are White House staffers with compromised phones wandering around the White House, acting as unwitting mobile bugging devices? How serious a risk is that?

Clearly, the Secret Service is an extremely competent organization, but just on the off chance that they might not have thought of this one, I considered it my patriotic duty to bring it to the attention of some slightly scary government friends I have in Washington. Whether they every found anything on those BlackBerrys is something we’ll all probably never know.

Bumbling Brit
And that brings our story back to our bonking Brit and his BlackBerry bandit. Just how much trouble did this aide’s problematic peccadillo get him into? Of more concern, how much damage did our international man of mystery’s “special branch” do to Britain’s security — and, by extension, the security of her allies?

We know a single BlackBerry can store a surprising amount, the equivalent of about 28,000 printed pages of data, or — in keeping with the theme of our British boner — the equivalent of seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels. That’s a lot of strategic government information to lose to the Chinese.

We also know a single BlackBerry can be turned into a shockingly powerful surveillance device, with all sort of disturbing implications for national security.

The Sunday Times reports “that even if the aide’s device did not contain anything top secret, it might enable a hostile intelligence service to hack into the Downing Street server, potentially gaining access to No 10’s email traffic and text messages.”

As these various stories — my initial book scenario, the Mexican theft of U.S. government BlackBerry devices, this new Chinese theft of British BlackBerrys — have shown, the risk of BlackBerry theft is particularly high when government officials are traveling.

These devices are often the mobile extension of their offices, their primary means of communication, and their personal, pocket file cabinets.

So, what should governments do?
I’ve made recommendations before about the secured handling of handheld devices. If you recall, I recommended the establishment of an Electronic Communication Protection Detail, a group I’ve recommend be created as part of the Secret Service to manage all of the email security issues. I’ve recommended each staffer issued such a device needs to be trained to notify the Electronic Communication Protection Detail immediately when a device is lost.

But clearly more is required. It’s clear that the White House, and, by extension, governments of our strategic allies need to establish a complete end-to-end asset management policy for handheld devices. Guidelines need to be established for where these devices can be taken, when they can be removed from one’s person, and how they should be handled in secured situations like those that ocurred in New Orleans and Shanghai.

Finally, a true rapid-response operation needs to be established so data can’t fall into the wrong hands. I’ve recommended that no communication device be issued to White House staffers without two key features: location and destruction.

It is possible to both remotely erase certain BlackBerry devices and remotely locate them. When lost, a team from the Electronic Communication Protection Detail should first trigger the remote erase and then a tracking team needs to be dispatched to recover these little mobile nightmares as quickly as possible.

Clearly, the Secret Service responded relatively quickly in the New Orleans case and recovered the devices. We don’t know whether the Special Branch recovered the missing British device. In the case of the theft of the American devices, because there was no apparent remote destruction capability, the data wasn’t secured until the physical devices were. And, again, we don’t know whether or not the Brits had any operation in place to secure their missing device.

In the case of the American loss, where the devices were stolen from a table outside a hotel conference room, the devices never would have fallen into the hands of a foreign power had a better procedure been in place.

However, in the case of our Downing Street dirty dancer, the only possible protective procedure is better on-device security and remote destruction. No power in the world will prevent amorous aides from doing the nasty given the right temptation.

As Austin Powers once said, “Shall we shag now, or shall we shag later?” Either way, without better BlackBerry security, we’re all shagged.

MY THOUGHTS:

Why do people still mess with the Chinese?

Sure visiting China is a good thing from a historical prospective. Go see the “Great Wall”, take in some food places, take in the smog, check out Tiananmen Square and enjoy the Chinese hierarchy that will be happy to steal everything you have and then claim “you should have known”, which is correct.

Let me give you some TOP SECRET advice here, “THE CHINESE ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED, PERIOD!”

Anything you take with you over there will be gone through, copied, broken down, reverse engineered and then stolen in any form they can come up with. So don’t do it.

Carry your wallet, some clothes and your passport and Visa, Hell, they already have copies of those anyway and they know who you are before you land in that God forsaken country.

Any government employee, politician, or other that carries a computer, blackberry, cell phone, or any other electronic device to China should be charged with Treason (for giving away State secrets).

You have my view, there is no confusion

Gods Speed - EFPIPPS

Gun registration begins in District

Article in Richmond Times Dispatch, July 18, 2008 

I would have posted the article I read on the above subject, but The Richmond Times Dispatch does not post all of the articles it has in the paper onto the internet.  (here’s a similar story)

I believe Washington DC prides itself on being the “strictest” place in America on gun owners, more to the point they are confusing strictest with most ignorant. 

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of Mr. Dick Heller and his ability to possess a handgun in the “District”, but now the “District” genius’ have stated that even with the Supreme Court decision a law abiding citizen  “may keep handguns only for self defense – at home, unloaded and disassembled, or equipped with trigger locks. 

This is tantamount to outlawing the weapons in spirit.  The law also bans weapons broadly defined as machine guns that can fire (12) rounds or more (what in the heck are they talking about here, a machine gun is anything with more than 12 rounds?), which rules out most semiautomatic handguns. 

Add to this the only reason a law abiding citizen can: go get the weapon, put it together and use it for the purposes the highest court in the land has stated specifically a citizen can do, this little tidbit was added by the “District”, a weapon can be readied for use only if there’s the “reasonably perceived threat of immediate harm.”

What happened to “in fear of my life or the life of another”, which is much simpler to understand, define and explain.  The “District” has chosen a much more complicated definition because then, no matter how straight forward the aggression and justification for protecting oneself, the “District” gets to decide if it is justifiable. 

Politics can play a greater role in the shooting and sure the home owner protecting his or her self will be released from the criminal charges (hopefully), they will be much more apt to take a plea on something than to risk a murder or manslaughter rap and a full trial and possible jail.  This knocks out their ability to ever have a firearm again and this is when the homeowner is in the right 100%. 

So, it is off to file suit again and go through the same process again for something the Supreme Court should state to all and especially the “District” and that is, law abiding citizens can, should and will possess their firearms no matter what liberal, pink pantied, I wish I was somebody but will never be anybody, my life is lower than a snail’s ass dragging the pavement “District” politicians say. 

And, as Forrest Gump stated so eloquently said, “That’s all I’m gonna say about that.”

God Speed - EFPIPPS

This illustration provided by The New Yorker magazine, the cover of the July 21, 2008 issue by artist Barry Blitt, shows Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim and his wife as a terrorist. (AP Photo/New Yorker)

Obama in Texas

Barack Obama, the lead Presidential Democratic Party candidate, is for banning all guns in America . He is considered by those who have dealt with him as a bit more than just a little self righteous.
 
At a recent rural elementary school assembly in East Texas, he asked the audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, he started to slowly clap his hands once every few seconds, holding the audience in total silence.
 
Then he said into the microphone, “Children, every time I clap my hands together, a child in America dies from gun violence.”
 
Then, little Richard Earl, with a proud East Texas drawl, pierced the quiet and said: “‘Well, dumb-ass, stop clapping!”