The Attributer and his Wife enjoy watching television for relaxation and they often watch ‘detective’ programmes. Recently one such programme focused on a plot that revolves around knowing what time it really is. It served as a reminder that this aspect of security is as important today as ever it was, even though it’s an old and well-known theme. If you can fool someone about what the time is, then you can dupe him or her in so many different ways.
In this television story there was a young man who suspected that his father’s alleged suicide was in fact murder and that one of his family was to blame, but he could not determine which one was guilty. He had followed his father’s footsteps as a scientific inventor and so he announced that he had invented a time machine that would enable him to travel back in time to investigate what happened when his father died. The machine was literally a lot of ‘smoke and mirrors’ – blue electric sparks arcing between huge shiny steel balls, dry ice vapours blown around by noisy whirring electric fans, flashing lights, a control panel with banks of switches and dials, and so on. Very theatrical – you get the idea I’m sure.
The family dismissed him as a lunatic, firstly because of his belief that his father had been murdered when there was ‘evidence’ of suicide, and secondly because of his ridiculous claim to having built a time machine. So, he needed to demonstrate that his machine worked. His demonstration was to travel into the future, not into the past, but if someone could be persuaded that he had succeeded, then maybe it would flush out the culprit, who would then believe that traveling back to the murder scene would be possible.
The house had many clocks in it, and he arranged that the demo would begin at just before twelve noon. When the time came he entered the drawing room to call the family and the amateur detective together in his laboratory. He switched on the time machine, quite frightening them all with the noise and smoke. He emerged from the cloud of smoke with a sealed envelop saying that he had travelled forward in time and had written down the names of the three winning horses in the twelve o’clock race – first, second and third places. He then switched on the radio to listen to the race in real time, and when the winners were announced, he asked the detective to open the envelope. Sure enough, the three winning horses were written on the paper.
Well, it rather spoiled the story for The Attributer because it was such an old trick used in fraud of many kinds, but The Attributer’s Wife was suitably puzzled. What he had done was to set all the clocks in the house back by enough minutes for him to find out the results of the race, but not so much time as for the others to notice the time difference. The radio was a disguised tape recorder with the race commentary captured from about seven minutes earlier.
Any forensic investigation involves establishing a time line – the logical sequence of events that surround the specific event being investigated. Who was where and when? In what sequence did things happen? Would certain hypotheses fit with this established time line? Trusted time is critical in such investigations. All important transactions and actions in a digital computing world are time/date stamped for exactly this purpose. It is assumed that such time/date stamps are accurate, but if someone tampers with them, or resets the reference clock by which you compare them, then the logical sequence is disrupted in a way that can be exploited by the wrongdoer.
This tells us once again that SABSA Attributes profiling is a powerful tool for setting requirements. If you do not capture all the investigation requirements in detail, then you have little hope of establishing the truth. And yes, the ploy did work – one of the cousins panicked and fled.