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Nixon Tape To Reveal Secrets at Last?
jonerik writes: "As part of its inevitable 30th-anniversary-of-Watergate coverage, ABC News has this article on the National Archives' search for someone who can recover part or all of the missing 18 ½ minutes of President Nixon's Oval Office tapes, whose existence had been unknown until the Watergate hearings. The famous tape - recorded on June 20th, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in - was last examined in 1974, but Nixon tape archivist Karl Weissenbach is hoping that nearly thirty years of technological progress can make the difference this time, saying 'We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered.' Stephen St. Croix, one of several forensic audio experts who is interested in taking on the job, says 'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'" There's another article in Wired on this quest as well.
lengths to write over the tapes 20-30 times to try and ensure that data is NOT recoverable. It costs a bundle and is suppose to be totally gone from the 38k c-tape.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I read an article a few days ago about this somewhere, I dont remember where though. Anyway, appearently Nixon was going to erase ALL the tapes, but he realized there were so many of them it would take his lifetime to erase. So he chose to just erase a tiny bit of one tape. The tape was recorded over "between 7 and 11 times". The company that decodes that tape, while getting no compensation from the government, will be rich in publicity alone.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
but wouldn't it be funny if the missing minutes were just Nixon concealing from his wife the fact that he'd been yuk-yukking it up with his beer buddies about his latest sexual conquests...?
"To decipher that data, forensic experts would use "bandpass filters" and other high-tech devices that look for frequencies that they do not need within a sound."
Wow, "bandpass filters"; that _is_ high-tech! Wonder when they'll be available to consumers.
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Ooh, I want to be the first to release the deleted parts as lowercase? Do I have to pay royalties to the Nixon estate?
Would they have to make clear what the sounds constituted, then, to prove they deserved royalties?
...isn't that the long version of Inna Gadda Davida?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
"Fr15+ P05+!!!1!"
Personally, I'm fairly interested in all this, especially seeing who it's going to hurt today. Remember that 30 years ago is not ancient history. Many people who are still high-ranking members of government now were members of government then.
In the recent hooplah surrounding the new book, Pat Buchannan was named as a possible 'Deep Throat', something I seriously doubt. Still, it raises questions. Suppose that someone we respect *cough* *cough* is in actuality a criminal?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Nixon wasn't impeached.
Yea, and Clinton "was" imepached. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
Hey, maybe if more "terrible secrets" get revealed, they can impeach him today. Weren't they going to try that with Clinton? heh.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Interesting guy. Here's a link to his company's webpage.
Okay, so it wasn't the greatest film. But I thought their explanation for the missing eighteen minutes and the whole Deep Throat thing was pretty damned amusing. The dream sequence between Michelle Williams and Dan Hedaya was hilarilous. Incidentally, Hedaya is one of the better Nixons I've seen.
And wouldn't it be a crack up if the missing minutes really were the confessions of a lovesick teenager?
|>
Here be Dragons
I realize the technical merits of the article, but why is the general media still harping on something that happened 30 years ago? Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...? These things are much more current and still have real implications to people in power (not to mention someone is dead).
You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.
I have a blowtorch that says magnetic tape can be erased.
Only works if your heads are 100% perfectally on track.. if its the least bit off, there will be residual patterns that can be recovered..
:) )
True its an ENORMOUS amount of work. but it can be done.. Just ask any NSA agent.. ( but dont tell them i sent you
---- Booth was a patriot ----
he resigned and he was pardoned.
One could hardly say that justice was done, or that the whole truth was revealed.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Little too early - these were reel to reel audio tapes, iirc.
That said, digital data can be recovered even when written over a few times. Analog data is probably significantly more difficult, as you can't look for up or down "ghost echos"... you kinda have to try and clean up a faint signal scattered in a noisy medium. Some impressive algorithims cleaning up "random noise" have been popping up lately - don't ask me how they work, though. Some Deep Magic lies in that field.
And yes, getting overwritten data is tremendously expensive, requiring that you peel apart the media and run it through a physical magnetic scanning device. There are several private companies you can approach, with basic consultation (no recovery) starting at ten or twenty thousand dollars. They have pretty good track records, and I know a couple financial institutions that used their services. I'm sure there are some people in the NSA who are just as good (I'd imagine that the private companies and spooks are pretty much the same pool of people and experts).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I think the analogy to FAT does not go very far. At least for the usual use of harddisks it's this way: if you overwirte it (with /dev/random, f.i.), it's gone. I remember when a friend found out about undelete and wanted to show me how great it works and that he can save more data on his hardisk that way.. luckily he just chose autoxec.bat for his demonstration (we were about 13 then).
I think marking a file as deleted is just like removing the label from a tape. The interesting part is, to recover the data, after it has been overwritten.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
Oh, I dunno about that. What if it turns out Nixon
made some comment that incriminated him WRT getting JFK whacked for fixing the '60 election or maybe
admitting he was one of those reptilian space aliens
or some other whacky shit?
When Gerald Ford tried to erase *his* tapes, the pencil eraser kept getting caught on the sticky side.
Best Windows Freeware
Right. He resigned because he was about to be impeached.
- Have a picture
These tapes could have won Al Gore the Presidency. I heard these 18 1/2 minutes were Sen. Albert Gore Sr., introducing his son and Al Jr. discussing plans for the Internet
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman...
Soccer Goal Plans
Here are some links on this bit of US history. Good old Tricky Dicky made Bill Clinton look like a choir boy. At least Clinton never tried to circumvent democracy covertly or, for that matter, overtly (that we know).
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I think the most troubling thing about Watergate is that since then the amount of credible investigative journalism has dwindled to the point of non-existence. What is news is now determined by the corporate or political interests -- guys like the head of Fox saying that reporting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan doesn't do anyone any good, or John Ashcroft saying that criticizing the Bush administration is on par with helping the terrorists directly.
It's not just an American phenomenon. Up here in Canada two editors have been fired in last couple of years for writing editorials criticizing the Liberal government, because the two editors were working for a newspaper chain owned by Izzy Asper, a buddy of the PM. And as CNN goes international, you see them representing the conservative American viewpoint abroad, to the point of feeding a smear campaign against leaders like Pres. Chavez in Venezuela in their home country.
It's gotten so bad that the only people who openly criticize the powers that be have been largely marginalized (and then dismissed) as radical leftists -- Chomsky, Fisk, Moore, etc. These are brilliant guys with important questions, but the moment you mention their names the ad hominems commence as the argument degenerates into how big of a kook they are.
I guess the big question I have is, if a scandal like Watergate were to hit the ground, in the bustling forest of today's largely goose-stepping society, would it make a sound? I'm worried it wouldn't.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
a low-level format will prevent data recovery using the heads that are attached to the platters by default, but one can put much more sensitive (and expensive) heads over the platters and read erased data with ease. Hell, with even more expensive equipment you can not only recover the data that was erased, but the last few pieces of data that were stored there.
There's a version of Alice's Restaurant that I have on MP3 where Arlo talks about exactly this. He claims that during the Carter Inauguration, Chip Carter pulled him aside and noted that they had found an LP of 'Alice's Restaurant' in the library. Arlo goes on to joke, "So, how many things can you think of that are 18 1/2 minutes long?".
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.
Bull puckey. If you record over a tape enough times you will erase the original information. Otherwise, a length of tape could hole an infinite amount of information.
OTOH, just because you 'can' erase a tape, doesn't mean that it was done in this case.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Following up on my own post:
Nixon resigned after he was told that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict him. So he was a lot closer to the edge of the cliff than Clinton, who was impeached on a party-line vote and acquitted by the Senate. The votes in the Senate weren't even close to the 2/3 supermajority needed to convict him.
- Have a picture
Other theories, anyone?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
enjoy!
At least millions of innocents didn't die.
s inger/
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/18/kis
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
The movie Dick exposed this years ago.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
They go on to detail how they had to mark the buttons so that Nixon could use a tape recorder. Wow.
Imagine -- the guy needed instructions to use his custom built, custom installed voice-activated tape recorder. And, since he the times that he had to make damn sure he was using it right were probably times he didn't want some 23 year old geek getting in his way, he made damn sure the geeks marked the custom-installed buttons for the thing at the same time they gave him verbel instructions.
Yeah, Nixon was a moron. You're clearly so much smarter, because you can use linux.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
There as a show on the Discovery Channel last night (17Jun02) that was talking about efforts to recover the contents of the erased tape. It was quite interesting. Not quite sure what the show was called, because I missed the first 10 minutes of it.
There was a very informative interview with somebody from one of the companies competing for the project. They used some pretty sophisticated computer processing and filtering algorithms on other tapes and actually could recover intelligible conversations.
The companies competing for the project are going to have to prove they are capable of recovering an erased tape by using a demo tape that was erased with the same tape recorder used by Nixon.
The guy they interviewed was talking about building a specialized unit with a bunch of read heads that would be used to digitize audio from the erased tape (reading the tape in DLT fashion it seemed).
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
AltaVista:
Republican Scandal 49,798 hits
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Google:
Republican Scandal 108,000 hits
Democratic Scandal 162,000 hits
The full op-ed piece can be found here
Where can one find more information on how to execute the type of recoveries that the guy was talking about? band pass filters, etc. I'm interested in specific techniques, not generalities. Also interested in specific techniques on how to clean up bad audio (I know some but it can't hurt to know more, can it?)
A good analogy if someone be accused of a crime. Impeachment would be analagous to incitement and removal from office would be analoagous to being found guilty.
Nixon and Clinton were both impeached.
I don't mean to be an ass, but it is not okay for adults or even teenagers to not know this. I get mad about techies who don't know this just as I get mad when normals brag about being bad at math. Of course it is also not okay to spell as badly as I do.
Grytpype's comment should be modded down to 1; it is incorrect.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
The Foster suicide has been investigated numerous times by numerous agencies and even news organizations. In each and every case, the conclusion was the same... he committed suicide.
You might be interested to read David Brock's new book "Blinded by the right", where he goes through a lot of these stories and shows how the right-wing media worked to fabricate them, and how uncredible most of the "witnesses" really were.
Watergate is a big deal for the same reason that some people think Bob Dylan can sing: it's a Baby Boomer thing. First the Baby Boomers discovered color, sex, civil rights, and opposition to the war. Then they discovered political scandal, and that was Watergate. By the time Reagan came around, they had discovered cocaine, tax-free municipal bonds, and all-white neighborhoods, so they didn't notice.
it makes sense if you bother to learn the definition of impeach
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I have to fix GUI that are written by peple with that mentality all the time.
I know what it is, therefor it's intuitive.
sheesh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In practice people don't erase/record over a tape enough to erase the original information. The effort and time involved in doing so is non-negligable so in practice people don't do it.
If the data on the tape were that important, if you had the opportunity and if you knew that recording over the top would not work unless you did it a lot and with the right sort of sounds you'd simply destroy the tape, ie by converting it to a pile of ash and smoke, dissolving it in acid or otherwise rendering it chemically different from it's original state.
It may be possible to record over a tape to the degree that the original data becomes unrecoverable with any degree of certainty, but it remains impractical to do so.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
www.baudline.com has a selection of Mystery Signals for you to try and identify what they are. Help is provided on how to use the program [called, appropriately enough, 'Baudline'] to isolate, filter, and massage the sound in various ways to figure out what it really is.
It is a sound analysis toolkit that is very flexible and is targeted at audio signal analysis, not editing. See more details here.
Anyway, their Mystery Signals are pretty fun to play with and try to figure out. Hints are provided, as are answers if you choose to look. The explanation provided for this file is:
This mystery signal is the sound of the harmonic oscillations of a surf board strapped to the roof of a rental car that is slowly accelerating. There are two signals of interest here. Let's break it down. The 4 cylinder rental car accelerates from about 30 MPH at the start to about 50 MPH at the end of the file. Switching to a 16384 point FFT size will help bring out the detail. The first signal starts at 80 Hz and it slowly increases in a linear fashion to 88 Hz at the 12 second mark. Using the harmonic helper bars, the 3rd harmonic is the strongest, but the 2nd and 4th are faintly visble. This is the sound of the car engine reving from 2400 to 2640 RPM. Then at the 12 second mark a transition that takes about 3/4 of a second occurs, this is the gear shift of the automatic transmission. The new new fundemental is about 70 Hz and it slowly increases again in a linear fashion to 74 Hz where the file ends. This equates to an increase in engine rev speed from 2100 RPM to 2220 RPM. The acceleration was slow and the RPM calculations match the behavior one would expect from a low performance 4 cylinder rental car with an automatic transmission. The second signal of interest starts at 128 Hz and time zero. Things are fairly calm and the coupled surf board, springy strap, and rental car roof speaker cone are just starting to hum and oscillate. The harmonic helper bars show that the fundamental and the 2nd thru the 6th harmonic are all related. Tracking the wiggles of the fundamental over time show that and they match the variations in the harmonics perfectly. As the car speeds up the lift and the wind force on the surf board increases and the wild harmonic oscillations increase in strength and frequency. There could be some chaos here, it looks like some bifurcation of modulation modes are happening, but some further measurements and analysis is required to say for sure. This mystery signal was recorded on a Canon S110 digital camera in low resolution movie mode. Baudline can read the Canon .AVI movie files and automatically extract the audio. In 160x120 low res mode the S110 can record for 30 seconds which which when coupled with baudline makes it an excellent portable sound recording device. The Canon S110 sound samples are 8-bit at a 11024 sample rate. Looking at the histogram you can see the huge negative DC offset lopsidedness and that every other bin is zero. The even odd bin holes show that the signal originally was 8 bit sampled. The DC offset is most likely caused by a firmware bug in the camera. In the frequency domain this DC offset equates to a strong 0 Hz tone which can visually ignored or corrected with the equalization window.
Program Features: .wav, .aiff, .au, .al, .snd, .voc, .rmd, . pvf, .mp3, ID3, .ogg, .gsm, .sah, raw, .avi, .mov
o channels: mono, stereo, ... up to 9 channels
o data formats: ASCII decimal, A-law, u-law, 1-bit (msb & lsb), 8-bit (signed & unsigned), 16/24/32-bit integer (little & big endian), float, double
o compression
+ lossless suffixes: .gz, .bz2, .Z, .zip, .flac
+ codecs: ADPCM, GSM, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis
* 192 kHz real-time bandwidth * 96 dB dynamic range * Multiple sound card support * Input stream DC offset correction and delay line equalization * Configurable input channels that can perform various operations * Frequency, time, amplitude, and sample probability distribution analysis * High speed displays * Test signal generation * Drift Integration "de-chirping" * Audio player o looping o speed control with multirate resampling o pitch scaling o heterodyning (frequency shifting) o 2D matrix surround panning o notch, high, and low pass filters * File loading o file formats:
Grab the latest binary(only) here or find it in the BSD Ports.
Why in hell didn't he simply burn them?
You're using her as bait, Master!
...thanks to a top secret DARPA project, unknown till now.
;)
Here's a look at what it's been recording recently in the Oval Office...
A poll of people born after 1965 found that only 16% knew the main facts of Watergate. The same poll increased to 60% for those born earlier.
Almost any major historical event has a similar recognition depending on whether one has lived through it or not.