KXLY gives extensive details on the FBI hunt for a person who tried to bomb the MLK holiday parade in Spokane:

From north to Colville, to the top of the Parkade in downtown Spokane and down south to Lewiston, federal agents cast a wide net as they chased down clues in the wake of the attempted bombing of the Unity March last Monday.

The way they describe the bomb reminds me of improvised explosives that a friend of mine in the U.S. Army used to tell stories about — part of his training for NATO operations in the 1980s.

Not far away the same news team found a receipt from a Lewiston sporting goods store. The FBI was notified, and they felt the receipt was a significant find because at the store a person could purchase black powder which could be used to power a bomb. That same store also sells ball bearings that could have been used as shrapnel to make that bomb even more lethal.

Because the bomb did not explode, it becomes a wealth of clues for the investigation.

A surveillance system could have helped, but it was offline at the time.

Members of the JTTF hoped the Parkade’s surveillance system may have picked up images of the drivers who used the garage Monday morning. Unfortunately, the security department was switching between servers at the time and the video not recorded.

I suspect they will be re-engineering that system with some redundancy now so that it does not go offline when they switch servers.

Police found the pigeon wandering around outside a prison with a suspicious-looking bag attached.

The bird was flying towards a jail in the north-eastern city of Bucaramanga when it was discovered nearby by officers with a bag strapped to its back.

Police recovered 40g of marijuana and 5g of a paste containing cocaine and believe the package was too heavy for the bird to clear the prison walls.

The Telegraph story also points out other cases of trained birds used in Columbia for security and transportation. A parrot was taught to say “run” when police approached.

The 45g of drugs is approximately 1.6 oz. It does not seem like a lot for a pigeon, since they weigh 10-16 oz themselves and are trained to fly with up to 70g (depending on distance and weather). I wonder how high the wall is.

Although the police called it ingenuity, it seems to me the parrot should have been taught a code word — anything less obvious than “run” — and the pigeons should have been sent more often with smaller amounts and in a flock. A single pigeon is an unusual sight, let alone with a backpack.

This reminds me of the case in Brazil where the pigeon was caught while it rested on a wire. Its backpack not only had parts for a cell phone, but also a note with the name of the intended recipient inside the jail. Not ingenious.

Some curious students have built a robot that mechanically cracks electronic safes.

It is worth noting that the standard lock for classified documents has since been upgraded to an even more advanced electronic lock, so our machine is not a national security threat. I’m going to be describing our process under the assumption that the lock really is “manipulation-proof” and that the only way to open the safe is to try every possible combination.

Combination space optimization is the key. By exploiting of the mechanical tolerances of the lock and certain combination “forbidden zones”, we reduced the number of possible combinations by about an order of magnitude. Again, read the paper mentioned above for details. Grant implemented our algorithm in Java and was able to test it far before we started constructing the dialer.

They say their “auto dialer” robot, run by a laptop, successfully opened the safe in only a couple hours.