REACT head office location

They're on the 4th floor of this building. Taggers & grafitti artists, do your worst!

Physical location of REACT head office.

1919 south bascom ave
4th floor
Campbell CA
408 558 1198

thanks gizmodo scans for the answer!

Origional Gizmodo article

Article with full scans of REACT receipts here:

http://gizmodo.com/5524843/police-seize-jason-chens-computers

Physical location of REACT offices?

Trying to figure out the actual addresses of the two offices REACT uses. Where are they?

List of companies on the REACT board?

I am trying to put together a list of all the corporations on the REACT board. Does anyone know of a full list anywhere?

Hello. My name is Owen Ferguson, and I am a freelance journalist. I am
working on a project about REACT, and thought I'd check out what email
addresses are on the domain registration. So - who am I talking to?
How do I reach the guy who decides which reporters' homes to raid?

Valley REACTs to Craigslist counterfeits

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal - by Mary Duan

Vicki Thompson

David Hendrickson heads the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a Santa Clara consortium of law enforcers looking into software piracy.

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Two leading software makers have asked a Silicon Valley high-tech crime task force to help prevent an estimated $50 billion in pirated products from flooding markets, and they’re specifically targeting Craigslist sellers.

San Jose-based Adobe Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in recent months asked the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a consortium of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies headquartered in Santa Clara, to investigate pirated software being manufactured and sold through the online classified site.

“They are looking into a concerted effort to address piracy and counterfeiting happening on Craigslist,” said David Hendrickson, REACT’s project director and an investigator with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office. “We’re working with Microsoft and Adobe to find ways to address the issue and make a point to the public that we’re going to enforce the laws and assist the industry, and we’re going to collaboratively identify the people who are pirating the products, make undercover buys and make arrests.”

More pirates

The need for anti-piracy enforcement is born out in a report issued on May 12 by IT research and forecasting firm IDC on behalf of the Business Software Alliance, a software industry organization. The report showed that while the U.S. has the lowest PC software piracy rate in the world at 20 percent, it has the largest dollar loss from piracy at $9.1 billion because it’s the largest software market.

And the potential loss extends further than software. For every dollar of PC software sold in a country, there is another $3 to $4 of potential revenue for local IT service companies and distribution firms, according to the report.

An IDC report issued last July on piracy trends in California showed the value of pirated software and related services to support that software had reached $3.8 billion, or enough to hire 16,000 high-tech workers, said Dale Curtis, BSA’s vice president of communications.

“We’re talking about billions of dollars not in the coffers of development companies and production companies. They’re not able to support new jobs and not able to support the R&D of new products,” Curtis said.

Steve Studhalter, a senior program manager for Microsoft’s worldwide anti-piracy team in Mountain View, said Craigslist in particular has become an outlet for pirated goods because it is community-based marketing. Buyers on sites such as eBay.com have a level of protection, either through their credit card companies or though payment facilitators such as PayPal if what they’re buying turns out to be fake, he said.

On its site, however, Craigslist says it is not involved in transactions and doesn’t handle payments, guarantee transactions, provide escrow services, or offer “buyer protection” or “seller certification.” The site advises buyers of pirated software to contact the Software & Information Industry Association, a trade organization.

Craigslist’s press office did not respond to several requests for comment.

Studhalter said the sophistication of pirated software varies, but goods are so advanced that even Microsoft team members sometimes have trouble telling the difference. Studhalter said he couldn’t put a dollar value on the impact, but over the past few years, piracy has grown as more people and businesses are looking for bargains.

“In my time here, I’ve seen a definite shift in how counterfeiters operate. The schemes have changed, the source countries have changed, but the impact on businesses remains steady or is increasing,” said Studhalter, who joined Microsoft four years ago after 28 years in federal law enforcement.

Buyers may be shopping online rather than using trusted suppliers, deceived into believing they’re buying a genuine product, Studhalter said.

Microsoft and Adobe are members of REACT’s steering committee, a group of 25 companies that includes Apple Inc., Symantec Corp., KLA-Tencor Inc., Applied Materials Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., and acts as a liaison between industry and law enforcement.

REACT’s funding of just under $3 million comes from state Vehicle Licensing Fund taxes. Since its inception 11 years ago, the task force has made more than 1,000 arrests and recovered more than $1.4 billion in stolen, counterfeited or pirated goods. One recent case, headed by REACT investigator Marshall Norton, led to the arrests and convictions of three people who used credit card skimmers to steal people’s numbers and replicate their cards.

Suresh Balasubramanian, Adobe’s director of worldwide anti-piracy, said the company doesn’t reveal financial losses from piracy. But in the past year, Adobe has seen a general increase in the availability of Adobe products on the Internet and that pirated products increase the threat to consumers and businesses tricked into using illegitimate software.

“The illegitimate software compromises their computers, often leading to the exposure of sensitive information like bank accounts or protected usernames (and) passwords,” Balasubramanian said. “Customers should be aware of the dangers of pirated and counterfeit software, and cautious about where they buy their products. If a deal seems ‘too good to be true,’ it probably is.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1795

What is Apple Inc.'s role in task force investigating iPhone case?

1 hr 28 mins ago

The California criminal investigation into the case of the errant Apple G4 iPhone that Gizmodo.com unveiled before legions of curious Internet readers last week is noteworthy in its potential to make new media law. But it's also striking for another reason: The raid that San Mateo area cops conducted last week on the house ofGizmodo editor Jason Chen came at the behest of a special multi-agency task force that was commissioned to work with the computer industry to tackle high-tech crimes. And Apple Inc. sits on the task force's steering committee.

On Friday, members of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) Task Force entered Chen's home and seized four computers and two servers as evidence in a felony investigation. REACT is a partnership of 17 local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies headquartered in Santa Clara County, founded in 1997 to address "new types of crime directly tied to [California's] increasingly computer-oriented economy and widespread use of the Internet," according to the task force's website.

The idea was to bring a variety of business interests and police agencies together to help combat identity theft, computer fraud, and the like. The team's website explains that "high tech companies ... provide specialized training, liaison personnel and internal support for task force investigations."

What's curious is that one of those high-tech companies providing training, personnel, and support to the task force is Apple Inc., the alleged victim in the Gizmodo case. According to this May 2009 story from the San Jose Business Journal, Apple is one of the 25 companies that sit on REACT's "steering committee." Which raises the question as to whether Apple, which was outraged enough about Gizmodo's $5,000 purchase of the lost iPhone for CEO Steve Jobs to reportedly call Gawker Media owner Nick Denton to demand its return, sicked its high-tech cops on Chen.

Gizmodo says it paid $5,000 for the prototype 4G iPhone from someone who found it sitting untended on a bar stool in a Silicon Valley beer garden. Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney in the San Mateo District Attorney's office, told Yahoo! News that the search warrant on Chen's home was executed by members of the REACT Task Force in the course of investigating a "possible theft," but he didn't say whether the target was Gizmodo or the anonymous tipster who found the phone. In either case, it's hard to imagine — even if you grant that a theft may have occurred under California law, which requires people who come across lost items to make a good-faith effort to return them to their owner — how the loss of a single phone in a bar merits the involvement of an elite task force of local, state, and federal authorities devoted to "reducing the incidence of high technology crime through the apprehension of the professional organizers of large-scalecriminal activities," as the REACT website motto characterizes its mission.

"It depends," Wagstaffe says. "If there's something unusual about the phone, then yes, REACT would get involved. It deals with anything that's high-tech. So if it's hard to put a value on it — for instance, if it's not just any cell phone — then a local police force might have trouble assessing its value, and the task force would have the expertise to do that." By calling its steering committee member Apple, perhaps?

"That's a good question," Wagstaffe says. "I don't know if Apple is on the steering committee."

He referred us to another REACT spokeswoman. We asked her to confirm Apple's presence on the committee and to explain what, precisely, the committee does and how it relates to the task force's law enforcement efforts. She hasn't gotten back to us.

According to the San Jose Business Journal, other steering committee members include Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Adobe. This isn't the first criminal investigation REACT has conducted in which a steering-committee member was a victim: In 2006, REACT broke up a counterfeiting ring that was selling pirated copies of Norton Antivirus, which is produced by steering-committee member Symantec. REACT has also launched piracy investigations in response to requests from Microsoft and Adobe.

Apple did not return phone calls seeking comment.

— John Cook is a senior national reporter/blogger for Yahoo! News.

NOTE: John Cook was perviously a blogger at Gawker.com, which is owned by the same company that owns Gizmodo.com.

Welcome

Hello. The purpose of this blog is to track information pertaining to the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, and to encourage young hackers to stomp the shit out of their systems by posting news relating to the griefing of REACT team members and members of the corporations backing them.

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Tuesday, April 27, 2010