Safe? Deposit Boxes

“Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of”- Douglas Adams (British Writer, 1952-2001)

We all have important papers that we want preserved; life insurance, house title, car title, birth certificates, and so on. Losing these in a house fire just makes your loss and burdens even worse. So for generations, the advice of planners and preparers has been to keep your important papers off-property in a bank’s safe deposit box. But not anymore…

Many states, like California, are desperate to find money to pay for bloated budgets and they have discovered that unclaimed public property is a great revenue source. According to an ABC investigation, How Safe Is Your Safe-Deposit Box?, the California courts have issued injunctions barring the state from seizing any more property (like safe deposit boxes) until it made reforms. In a conflict of interest, California has changed the “no contact” period that triggers seizure from 15 years to 7, then to 5 and currently 3. (They even tried to reduce the waiting period to a single year.) On top of this, the state had not bothered to inform anyone that your safe deposit box is about to be taken by the state and IMMEDIATELY auctioned off or destroyed. It stopped sending notices to rightful owners because, "It could well result in additional claims of monies that would otherwise flow into the general fund."

Read the full story of How Safe Is Your Safe-Deposit Box? for tales of lost stocks, land rights, and valuable heirlooms. Family fortunes sold for a pittance at auctions to feed the state general fund.

Bottom Line

How do you protect yourself?

1. Make contact with your bank, your brokerage firm, etc. at least once a year, in a way that creates a paper trail. Make sure they have your current address.
2. If you own stock, occasionally vote your proxies or take other steps to keep your stock ownership active. Stay in touch with your broker or brokerage company.
3. Write a list of all your accounts and keep it with your will, so your heirs will know where to look.
4. Consider insuring valuables even if you keep them in your safe-deposit box. That way, you're covered financially if the bank or state makes a mistake and empties your box. Plus, safe-deposit contents have been known to be destroyed by fire or flooding.

If you want to search for unclaimed property in your name, check out the following links for more information:

National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators

http://www.missingmoney.com/

Espionage & Passwords

“Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody” - Mark Twain

Here is an unsettling story published in the Wall Street Journal, Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies.

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and
former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

As a computer programmer I understand that hackers would try to break into our infrastructure systems. But what concerns me is that they succeeded and could leave behind sleeping programs waiting for activation. “Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said.”

The WSJ reports, “Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.” I cannot for the life of me understand why a nuclear power plant should be accessible via the Internet. Perhaps workers want to push buttons from far away in case the plant starts to meltdown? I’ve worked at several companies with restricted Internet access. At one, there was no access, period. At two others they used VPN (Virtual Private Networks) to restrict access. VPN uses a token that displays a new “random” number every minute. To login I need my password and the current number on the token registered to me.

Sadly in many secure systems the weakest link is the human element. At one of my internships, the top executives (with the most data access) hated to memorize long passwords and asked for an exception so they could use two letter passwords. One hacker trick I’ve read about includes getting inside a company and then sitting down at computers where workers have left for lunch but left the PC logged on and connected to the company network. (Screen savers with passwords help protect against this). Another clever hacker passed out a survey to workers asking for names of pets, children, spouse, etc. He then checked to see if any worker had used a family name as their password; very common unfortunately. (A solution to this is requiring numbers and or special symbols in the password.)

Now it would be nice to think espionage would never happened but the WSJ describes two recent cases outside the US:

• In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks and rivers.
• Last year the CIA told utility company representatives that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands.

Bottom LineTwo points I’d like to emphasize here.
1. Water or electricity could fail at a moments notice with a hostile attack. Do you have backup water and a power generator or means to cook/light without electricity? ABC News did a follow-up story called What if Russia or China Cut Off Your Electricity? It goes through a typical day showing how pervasive electricity is...

• Your alarm clock
• Your laptop (when the batter dies) & wireless router
• Your landline phone perhaps work but not VOIP
• Your hot water heater (if not gas)
• Your gas oven (most have an electric starter instead of a pilot light)
• Traffic lights
• Gas station pumps
• Frozen/refrigerated food at the grocery store
• Cash Registers, Credit Cards

2. Always use a strong password. Studies have shown that longer is better. Password hackers are well aware of L33T, the trick of substituting letters with symbols like 9ary or G@ry for Gary. So don’t think you are safe with a short but clever password. One easy password method is to use the letters from a favorite hymn, bible verse, poem, etc. For example “tbontbtitq” for “To be or not to be, that is the question” (but please choose something less obvious). You can strengthen this by creating a personal pattern where you always capitalize the same letters (say 2nd and 3rd) “tBOntbtitq”

Data Rot

“Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.” - Steven Wright

Although we live in an information age, the information we take for granted is surprising fragile. Sometimes data erasure is deliberate as when Enron is shredding documents & erasing email. Sometimes data is changed to influence public opinion as is frequent on Wikipedia (see http://www.nolanchart.com/article6235.html) Sometimes data just rots.

What is data rot? Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, being stored in poor locations like moldy basements, make physical media very difficult to read. Do you recall when machines ate cassette tapes and videotapes? Vinyl albums that became scratched over time with hiss, crackles and track jumping? Old scratchy home movies on reels? Today’s kids laugh at the old technology and take pride in the “permanence” of CDs and DVDs.

My wife and I save money by watching movies on DVDs borrowed from the library. About one in five of these DVDs have been scratched badly enough that the player locks up. Sometimes we can skip past the bad region, sometimes not. We never saw most of “Bee Movie”; the DVD was in such poor shape.

Suppose you take great care of your DVD; how long will it last? Perhaps 100 years but also perhaps as little as Ten to Twenty years. If you have images you want to keep forever (like home movies and photos), experts recommend you make a copy of your DVD every 10 years. Unlike vinyl records, you don’t want to use the copy and keep the original unused for future copies. Cosmic rays can alter digital data and heat can warp the disc. That pristine but old DVD may become unreadable. So with DVDs use the old disc and keep the new copy in a safe place.

Bottom Line
To date there is no perfect long-term storage medium. Can you still play 8-track tapes? Does your PC have a floppy disc drive? Some have suggested the Internet as the ultimate backup. But data hosting companies go out of business or change policies. Kodak used to host photos for free but now wants to charge $5 per month. The best you can hope for a shell game where you keep moving your data to the newest technologies, trying to stay ahead of obsolescence and rot. And just like your money – DO NOT trust all your precious memories to a single storage medium. Use DVDs and multiple free websites.