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A lot of people have asked about my Tweet earlier that I had to call the police on an on-duty Metro employee, so I figure it’s just easier to post here.

About two years ago, I found a phone on the Metro, a $400 Treo Pro. I called the number marked “Home” on it, told the very grateful person that I had found it and that I was leaving it with the station manager.

When I tried to turn it in, I made the mistake of mentioning that I had called the person, at which point of time, she told me it was my problem, since I had broken Metro protocol by telling the person I had found the phone. I assume, given my experience before and since with Metro, that makes it harder for some Metro employee to “keep” the phone. Mind you, this was in the first two weeks of the “‘Scuse me, is thaaat your baaag?” announcements.

So I asked her what would be the protocol if I hadn’t mentioned that I had called the person. She accused of us of lying, etc. I had had enough of this BS, so I started to leave the phone on her desk. She picked it up and HURLED at me, striking me on chest. I had had enough. I called the Fairfax County Police, who told me to call Metro Police, the latter being useless scumbags.

Long story short, the woman ran off before the police came – at 6pm for “lunch” – and then when she got back, basically lied through her teeth with the help of her subordinate, making up a bullshit story about my lying to her about calling the person and then claiming that I hadn’t. (Remember, I said, “What would you’ve done had I not said I had called the owner?” – a hypothetical question). Eventually John Catoe showed up along with the line manager for the Orange Line, took the phone, and Metro Police essentially forced me to leave mid-conversation by shoving me out of the station. I took the station manager’s name, filed a complaint in writing, nothing ever came of it, of course. I’ve seen her since at “work” so I assume fully that she was either commended for her “honesty” or she got a free phone out of my efforts.

And of course, they continue to announce that if I see someone leave something behind, I should tell a Metro employee. I don’t any longer. If one day one of those phones is hooked up to a bomb, I hope that they name it after the station manager that taught me never to help Metro make itself safer. Also, that weekend, I got my US driver’s licence. So that I never again have to go on the Metro if I don’t want to.

I hear all of these Internet scare stories about how infected computers are everywhere, and how thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people are infected with malware everyday, but I honestly didn’t think I’d run into a zombie.

Until today.

I ended up on an unsecure wireless network and a few moments after I logged into Google Talk, up popped a message from a friend – let’s call him Mr P – asking me to download a file. Now Mr P here is one of the most reliable human beings on the planet and coupled with his technological brilliance, the chances of it being malware is close to none. So I clicked on it, only to have my firewall block the connection to the website, and my download manager refuse to download it as it was “known malware”.

Intriguing.

So Mr P spent some time checking the state of his computer – it’s hypothetically possible that his computer got infected – and came up nil. So I checked mine, and also came up nil. Weird.

However, when I started up Ethereal to sniff around the local network, sure enough – there was one computer running amok with outbound requests to everyone and everything.

For the first time, it seems that I have been the subject of a man-in-the-middle attack. Which is crazy.

Of course, if my paranoia was not great enough already, it has simply increased now, and I’m not sure how to resolve it. I’ve long considered establishing either a darknet to enable truly difficult to break into conversations, or setting up an SSH tunnel to handle all inbound and outbound traffic – though that means opening up more ports on the home network, which, as you can imagine, I am reluctant to do.

Would you all consider joining a communications darknet, like WASTE, to talk in relative security and assurance that there was no man-in-the-middle attack?