White House: Computer hard drives tossed

AP on Yahoo ^ | 3/21/08 | Pete Yost - ap

[savedbygrace]

You misunderstood or I wasn’t clear. Back when the Clinton WH was embroiled in its lost Email messages scandal, most everyone here excoriated the Clintons, and rightly so. Now that a Republican administration has done the same, or a similar, thing, many are ready to give Bush & Co the benefit of the doubt.

FR ought to treat corruption, and the appearance of corruption, equally, no matter who the President is.

That’s the point.

[mad_as_he$$]

Keeps the lawyers busy I guess.

[K-oneTexas]

It has happened before, during the Clinton Administration. What you have to determine is 1) was it an effort to hide something by one or more individuals in high ranking positions in the Administration or 2) was it part of the normal IT process as stated in the policy/procedure for maintenance and care of the equipment?

There's the rub. The House Dems don't care to get at the the truth. They have the same agenda as they've had over the last 7 years ... hate Bush, destroy him and his Presidency.

[Arrowhead1952]

We do the same for many DOD hard drives. They don’t stand much of a chance against a 15 LB sledgehammer. Even less when you run over them with the track of an M1 or use them as targets for an .50 cal.

What’s really bad is when a server goes bad and they restore a backup that is several weeks or months old. You get emails that are old and have no idea what to do with them - its like “I know I’ve seen that before” and then you look at the original date.

[angcat]

The word “tossed...........

Just like the Clinton's “tossed” our Ballistic Missile technology to the Chinese.

[Hat-Trick]

While they are at it, maybe they can take “H” off the keyboards. Works for Hillary or Hussein.

[MarkL]

I thought that everyone destroyed their old hard drives. Any time I’ve ever gotten a new PC, I’ve first taken and transferred some of my stuff to the new PC, left all the old junk, clutter, and old emails on the old drive. I then remove the drive from the chassis, take it outside and whop it a half dozen times with a 16 pound sledge. I don’t want some trash picker taking my old PC chasis out of the trash on trash day and browsing through my old bills, documents, and personal stuff. Even formatting the drive will not remove the files from a determined hacker. You have to physically destroy the drive.

When I did some work at a government installation, I'll never forget how angry the manager was for having to sign off on a VERY expensive 20MB hard drive that the thought was going to be replaced under warranty, when I explained that if I didn't have a core to return to Compaq, he was going to be billed for a brand new 20MB drive from the service department, i.e. about 2x the price of buying a new one from a computer store. I offered to not do the service, but he needed the computer fixed right away, and since the computer was in a secured area of the installation, the original drive had to be hand carried to the metal shredder, and he had to watch it shredded, and sign an affidavit.

Today there are software packages that was securely "shred" your data. There are a number of good free ones that will keep most determined hackers from being able to recover any data, though shipping the drive to a data recovery house like OnTrack might be able to recover it. And if you're willing to pay for the software, you can get DOD certified data destruction. It's rumored that the "No Such Agency" can recover data once it's been wiped by DOD certified software, but nobody's saying for sure.

Mark

[Natty Bumppo@frontier.net]

Roamer,

LOL, I concur regarding your clinkers, I’ll have to try that next time.

I live and work in a world of “really” important data. And while the number of entities with the skill and resources are limited, you can get far more than “a fragment or two” from drives that have been given multiple zero-writes. For “really” important data, if you have physical possession of an intact drive, it is surprisingly cost-effective to recover the data.

As for the “average Joe’s data” there are numerous, low cost, very low tech, methods to get that data, some perfectly legal. You don’t need physical access to their hard drives.

I don’t consider data from the White House as “average Joe’s data.” While I have no, direct, personal experience with that organization, I suspect they, and our adversaries, might consider it to be “really” important data.

[NormsRevenge]

Thanks for clarifying that.

yes the clintons were so good with records and such. (/sarc)

Stuff happens.. this is a sticky wicket as they say.

[NormsRevenge]

also, you may have read me as attempting to excuse the latest WH email issue by them producing those excerpts on e-discovery , the Judge, etc and seeking to defend the adminsitration.

that wasn’t my intent. I have been around technology along time and networks and such, it is not always a sstraight forward after the fact to retrieve some info no matter how well it has been backed up or archived.

altho, one ought to keep in mind how the dems would use this to actually try and make this an impeachable offense or claim the data was proof of lies lies lies about the conduct of the war by the WH and agencies under the WH.. etc.

I appreciate your comments on FR, but as a sidenote, I would also ask for as much concern may be raised over this, maybe we should also ask why we have allowed our primary process to become so corrupted and why that doesn’t receive near as much attention as it should as well, imo. That is a responsibility of all of us too.

[savedbygrace]

I agree, and I’ve posted a number of times about it.

I’ve attended Republican precinct and county-wide meetings, and found them to be controlled by the elites via Delphi techniques. And that’s in a small county in NE OK!

We are so close to losing this nation it just isn’t funny.

[NormsRevenge]

You are not alone in sharing that last sentiment.

[roamer_1]

I live and work in a world of “really” important data.

As do I. I have recovered sensitive data, and conducted forensic examinations for industry, banking, and for government agencies.

[...] you can get far more than “a fragment or two” from drives that have been given multiple zero-writes. For “really” important data, if you have physical possession of an intact drive, it is surprisingly cost-effective to recover the data.

Please PM me with links to white papers or describe such methods. I have no means to recover meaningful data from a 0-written hdd, and neither do the two recovery houses that I do business with.

I am familiar with theories and methods to recover from either side of the "data stream" and have been successful at doing so using software/firmware (driver based) attempts, but the resulting data is so fragmentary as to be entirely useless. I know of no "soft" method to reliably recover data in that condition, but I am always willing to learn.

As for the “average Joe’s data” there are numerous, low cost, very low tech, methods to get that data, some perfectly legal. You don’t need physical access to their hard drives.

As I said, please PM me with such methods.

I don’t consider data from the White House as “average Joe’s data.”

Granted. My comment was toward the idea that the average Joe must use such methods for disposing a drive. "Dumpster diving" hackers looking for sensitive personal data from residential or SOHO boxen are not looking to recover data from a 0-written drive. They are looking for drives that have not been reformatted, or have been quick-formatted (hence leaving the data in an easily retrievable state).

Even so, the institutions, corporations, and governmental entities that I do business with have differing classes of data disposal. most drives are not critical.

I go by a 3 level system for simplicity. "Green" tagged drives contain no sensitive data, and can be 0-scrubbed off and used again. These are usually just sent to me (or I pick them up), as they trust that I will rub them off before using/reselling.

"Yellow" tagged drives contain sensitive data and must be government wiped in order to reuse the drive, though I am generally just destroying these anymore, as the time to run a gvt wipe is not worth the value of the drive.

"Red" tagged drives are doomed to destruction, as they carry super-critical data. Often times these drives are brought by a company rep who stands by to witness the drives being destroyed- Hence the need to develop an efficient means (stoker fed coal fire).