US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs

pushcx 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

	▲	walrus01 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.

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taf2 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally

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1970-01-01 a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?

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geetee 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?

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walrus01 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.

	▲	thatfrenchguy 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.

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jeffbee 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

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like_any_other 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act

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walrus01 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

And in the same era in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_head_tax

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jeffbee 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.

	▲	sheafification 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I remember learning about that from Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, back in the day. It’s not even a US-specific thing. Many countries recruit foreigners to their militaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_militaries_that_recrui...

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walrus01 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.

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like_any_other an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The source said Liu was apprehended at Bangor International Airport (BIA) trying to catch a flight back to China, though the court records do not confirm the nature of his apprehension. - https://www.themainewire.com/2026/09/chinese-national-accuse...

Oddly the Tom's Hardware article, authored by "Zhiye Liu", omits this. But it's not really relevant - I'm sure there are lots of people with names like "Steve Robinson" or "John Wayne" in supervisory roles at China's CBP-equivalent, and staffing their news media.

	▲	Sarkie 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"But it's not really relevant" correct

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londons_explore 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?

My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.

The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".

	▲	genidoi 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.