Snowden again.. Why? (Page 5)

I'm not that saavy on how it's done.....I just know that if we dig long enough and turn over enough rocks we can usually find what we want.  We worked a murder a few months ago that was video'd on an I-phone and then erased......the experts had to go through encription.....but we got it.  And if you use Wi-fi......you can dump from your instrument....that doesn't mean the data isn't there within the IP address.  I know that from watching the child porn guys do their work.

Now, this I do know a lot about.    Simple explanation below.

So when data is written to a device such as a hard drive, thumb drive, or whatever, it simply manipulates the storage material to form a series of 1's and 0's.  On hard drive plates they use magnetism, and on thumb drives you have a gabillion EEPROM's that are manipulated.

Every file that's written to a storage device such as resume.doc has a pointer to that file that's stored in the directory structure on the hard drive.  The operating system just looks at these pointers to determine what files are available or not.  When you delete a file, you don't actually delete the 1's and 0's of the file, the operating system just deletes the pointer to the file.

So when guys like LB's computer crew comes in, they just run software that looks at all the raw files on the drive and can typically recover most files.

After a pointer is deleted, the space that is in use becomes available to be used again, so the longer a file sits deleted, the higher the probability of the space being over written with new 1's and 0's for the new file which then essentially deletes the old file for good.

To get even geekier, there are some capabilities with various media to see traces of data prior to them being overwritten, so in some rare cases a file can be recovered even after it was overwritten.

There are programs out there that do securely delete files from a computer.  What they do is they over write the actual file data with new random data multiple times and then they delete the file pointer.  So then the file is truly deleted.

However, some investigators such as the Child Porn teams LB mentioned can build a strong case with other evidence such as this IP address that was assigned to you showed a large amount of pictures downloaded over the past several months.  When we looked at your computer it didn't have any images, but there was a secure delete program installed and large areas of space on your hard drive that have random data showing that you deleted a lot of files securely.

So, even using the secure delete can incriminate you in other ways.

I've been heavily involved in some investigations from the network side as well.  You'd be amazed at how much us IT types have visibility into.  This is part of the reason I'm not a big fan of the government openly monitoring citizens data.

Great, just great.  I just came here for some free Ironman advice.  Now thanks to chirunner hanging with friends of friends of terrorists, I'm on the watchlist.  

The NSA actually goes out of their way to monitor leading researchers in mathematics and encryption and actively recruits them.  If the best and brightest are no longer working in the civilian world, well... you get the idea.

Even back in the early 90s when exporting encryption technology was still illegal, the NSA was estimated to be 20 years ahead of the civilian world in their encryption knowledge.  Many people today still think they maintain a large advantage.

That's why it was a big deal when the DES algorithm was cracked by a big distributed network of enthusiast computers.  Basically saying: look a bunch of us with no money cracked the "standard" encryption.  The NSA with a virtually unlimited budget and dedicated hardware could not only do this, but do it fast and easily.  This caused a big effort industry-wide to upgrade systems to be stronger.  This let us do things we take for granted today: online shopping, banking, you name it.

But we hear repeats of the scenario all the time.  New weaknesses are discovered in hashing and encryption methods.  Every time we find one, we have to assume the NSA knew about it for a long time.

I'm not saying that's good or bad... just that it's the nature of an organization that DEDICATES itself to doing this kind of work.  There is no comparison in the civilian world.

That's awesome. Worked for Bush.... I keep saying, Obama is just Bush 2.0

Wait a minute... that guy in the uniform kinda looks like LB...

lol, for the record none of them have been arrested or detained yet.  

Anybody going to watch the Brian Williams/Snowden interview tonight? I'm going to watch. I'm a Williams fan, so I will be interested if nothing else to see how Brian handles the interview.