April 1 2009

The meeting was called to order by President Eddie and the invocation was offered by Patty Cavanaugh. John Hanson then introduced our guests, which included Bentley Murrell and Marci Medway from the Five Points Club, Scott and Jay Downs, and then two guests invited by Joel Collins including last week's speaker Roi Canty from Ascension Hospice & The Lodge at Ascension, and Christian Stegmeier, an attorney who works with Joel in his law practice.

Blount Shepard was then called on to announce the next Adopt -a-Highway Clean-up Saturday and promised a breakfast that would be "to die for". I think I'm goin'!!!

President Eddie then announced "Happy Dollars time" and numerous members reported they were happy for various family members doing various achievements but the high-light was when President Eddie announced that he was contributing a happy "five dollars" because he had forgotten to call on Lynn Richards to give us Health and Happiness in the earlier time slot. So Eddie then called on Lynn and she said a card was available to sign, going to Bill Kopleman, and then gave us several tips on how to pull an April Fools prank on our fellow workers back at the office. I am sure we all immediately went back to the office and made our fellow workers feel really foolish.

President Eddie then turned the meeting over to Ginny Barr to introduce our speaker who was David A. Thomas, Special Agent in Charge of the Columbia Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in South Carolina. He said many people don"t even realize there is an FBI Group here in Columbia but they have 300 employees here, and they work closely with the Sheriff's Departments of both Richland and Lexington Counties, SCLED, and also local police departments. Mr. Thomas has over twenty years experience in the FBI, and although he has been Special Agent in Charge in several cities including St. Louis, he feels his tenure here in Columbia has been the best experience in his career.

Mr. Thomas has a wealth of experience in Ciber Crime Investigation and has assisted in the Ciber arena in fifty different countries. He spoke of Russia breaking into computors in the USA and referred to that practice as a "War Offense." He used a term of "Reverse Engineering" as a process and talked of intelligence devices, finding how they worked, and then how they would find a way to "jam" them.

Mr. Thomas talked of the FBI needing a gemologist to deal with jewel thieves so they sent him to different schools around the world to become a gemologist. They trained agents for covert entry and he said at one point he had to give mouth-to-mouth to a dog, because to enter a residence under suspicion, first they had to defuse a watch dog and when they were ready to leave the property they had to revive the dog so it would be like they had never been there. This practice gives new meaning to the term "Dog Breath".

Mr. Thomas talked of using the FBI intelligence initiative, on one hand, in Afghanistan, where maybe 10% of their 30,000 employees worldwide are used internationally to, on the other hand, making a contribution locally for gang related activities.

He also talked of keeping your computors at home safe by using anti-virus methods and keeping them updated. He said they have arrested some SPAM offenders that were making $500,000 - 750,000 per month from the hits to their somehow believable garbage offered because some people fall prey to these wonderful offers. His suggestion was to turn you computor off when not is use. Also when you use your credit card on line you might want to use "credit stops" to limit your exposure. I guess this makes some of us feel like we are walking around naked. How do you feel?

Meeting adjourned.

Larry Stohs