A: While you’re writing to me about this guy and your sister, the dude is probably sleeping with your mother. He’s bad news. Drop him before he starts hitting on your nana.

I’ve been following this story now for a couple of years.  Even for the CPD, it’s amazing that they haven’t “solved” this one yet – wait, did I just say it’s amazing?  Nah, it’s understandable; ignore it and it’ll go away.  Just like all those ignorant scum losers tortured into confessions.  a who knows, who cares mentality.  wait, is this an article about Chicago or Bolingbrook?  i get confused sometimes…

By now you’re probably familiar with the plight of Mark Geinosky, who got 24 bogus parking tickets in 14 months. The Tribune’s What’s Your Problem columnist, Jon Yates, has written about him 15 times. 

Geinosky’s case even inspired Yates to invent the Problem-O-Meter, which tracks how long it takes a business or government agency — in this case, the Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division — to resolve a complaint. As of Friday, that would be 744 days. And counting.

All of the tickets were issued by officers in the Targeted Response Unit, a special team that fights crimes in city “hot spots.” Someone apparently thought it was fun to write phony tickets, forcing Geinosky to go to court eight times to avoid paying thousands of dollars in fines. Each time, the tickets were quickly dismissed.

Thirteen of them were signed by the same officer, and those 13 tickets — though written at four different locations, in four different months — were numbered sequentially. That means there was a special ticket book somewhere that came out only when it was time to yank Geinosky’s chain again. But there also were other tickets, from other books, signed by other officers.

In every case, Geinosky learned about the supposed violations through the mail. Not once did he find a ticket on his windshield. That’s because his car wasn’t parked at the locations noted on the tickets. Some of them were even issued after he’d sold the car, and the license plates had been removed and stashed in his garage.

It’s hard to say which is more disturbing: That this sort of thing went on, or that the department’s internal police still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it.

More than three years ago, Geinosky contacted a unit supervisor, but he never got a response. So he filed a formal complaint with the Independent Police Review Authority, which forwarded it to the Internal Affairs Division, which closed the case immediately because hey, Internal Affairs doesn’t investigate parking tickets. As if Geinosky was asking Internal Affairs to rule on whether his car was parked too close to a fire hydrant.

So Geinosky called the Problem Solver, who wrote about the case for the first time on Feb. 24, 2009.

Right away, two things happened: Internal Affairs opened an investigation, and the tickets stopped coming.

But two years later, the sleuths at Internal Affairs are still combing through clues, or something. Every once in awhile, Yates calls for an update, and it’s always the same: The investigation is ongoing.

We’re starting to think the Police Department has its own device, the Stonewall-O-Meter: Every time Geinosky’s case appears in the Tribune — this makes 16 — everyone in Internal Affairs gets the afternoon off. No wonder it’s taking so long.

What’s the big deal? It’s not as if officers were delivering electrical shocks to the genitals of crime suspects to coerce them into confessing, perhaps the most famous instance in which the department proved utterly incapable of policing itself.

But harassing a law-abiding citizen with phony parking tickets isn’t mischief; it’s malice. Every day that Geinosky’s case drags on sends a message to other law-abiding citizens that this sort of thing is tolerated. It’s a poor reflection on the department, all the way to the top.

This isn’t the crime of the century. It’s somebody running amok. Solve it already.

A data breach at one of the world’s largest providers of marketing-email services may have enabled unauthorized people to access the names and email addresses for customers of major financial-services, retailing and other companies.

While no financial information was compromised, the major concern is that the emails and names could be used for “phishing,” that is, phony emails asking unsuspecting consumers to divulge information such as account numbers, log-ins or Social Security numbers.

As a result, companies were warning customers that they don’t ask for personal information, like credit-card and Social Security numbers, via email.

On April 1, Dallas-based Epsilon, a subsidiary of Alliance Data Systems Corp., said that on March 30, “A subset of Epsilon clients’ customer data 1 8 was 3 8 exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon’s email system.

”The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only,“ the company said, adding that no other information associated with those names was at risk.” The company said an investigation is under way.

Citigroup Inc., one of the affected companies, said it had been told by Epsilon that the information was limited to names and/or email addresses of some North American credit-card customers “and no account information or other information was compromised.”

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Barclays PLC, U.S. Bancorp and Capital One Financial Corp. also alerted their customers to the incident.

“As you can imagine, the email that is going out now isn’t going through Epsilon,” one bank representative said.

Walgreen Co., New York & Co. and Kroger Co., also said they were informed by Epsilon that files related to their customers might have been exposed.

SecurityWeek, which follows the Internet- and enterprise-security industry, said other companies affected included Brookstone, McKinsey & Co., Marriott International Inc., Ritz-Carlton and TiVo Inc.