Dangerous criminal escapes holding facility using rubber eyeball

A dangerous and highly adaptive criminal escaped from the regional holding facility in Morgantown, West Virginia today after using a rubber eyeball to hack the facility's iris-based biometric technology.

"Rubber Eyes" McCarthy

The escapee, Thomas McCarthy (pictured), was able to execute his dastardly scheme based upon a bizarre series of coincidences and his genius at exploiting them.

At first, authorities were concerned that an officer at the facility had been careless with his latent iris prints, leaving them strewn all over the jail for any semi-literate reprobate to pick up and do with as he pleased.

Further investigation, however revealed that the flaw in the jail's security lay in the fact that the maintenance staff had succeeded in enrolling a rubber ball that looked like an eyeball in the biometric system. As long as anyone had the rubber ball, they could go about their business of maintaining the facilities while also protecting their privacy. As one staff member put it, "Where I am at any given time is none of the chief's gal-dern business so long as the floors are swept."

The keenly observant McCarthy, however, noticed the staff's subterfuge and, with the aid of his girlfriend on the outside and Alibaba.com, was able to obtain a quantity of rubber eyeballs identical to the one the staff had enrolled. The rest is history.

The evidence

Despite McCarthy's escape, facility chief Strother Martin is looking on the bright side. "Since the minimum order for rubber eyeballs at Alibaba is 5000 pieces, we can in some ways count ourselves lucky that things weren't much worse. If old Rubber Eyes had been better at sharing, the whole place might be empty," he said.

Smartcard enthusiast Will Stephenson had this response: "You're all stupid. None of this would have happened with smartcards."

At the time of this writing, McCarthy's whereabouts are unknown.