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Data Recovered From DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Posted by Soulskill on from the put-that-in-a-safe-place dept.

Lucas123 writes "The Santa Cruz, Calif. DA's office had been counting on a DVD with the recorded testimony of a victim in case against a serial rapist, but when they popped the video into the player, nothing came up — the disc was blank. To make matters worse, the cop who performed the original interview with the victim told the DA she never said she was 'forced,' so the judge wasn't going to allow the witness to testify in a case where her original statement to police was in conflict with her current testimony. After two local data recovery firms said there was no way to restore the data, a third was able to recover the police interview from two years earlier, which led the defendant to plead guilty earlier this month. Close call."

18 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. eep by dissy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hardware: Recovered Data From a Corrupt DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

    Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence...

    1. Re:eep by lysergic.acid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      i was thinking in the same direction too. but when i read this part of the summary:

      but when they popped the video into the player, nothing came up -- the disc was blank.

      my immediate question was, "did they try a PAL player?"

      what's interesting to me is that two "data recovery firms" told them that the data was unrecoverable, but Seagate Recovery Service was able to recover the data without a problem. that makes me wonder if the earlier data recovery firms even tried to diagnose the problem or if they even knew anything about digital media & data storage. perhaps they thought that just by buying some digital forensics or data recovery software that automatically qualifies them to run a data recovery service. though i'm guessing that's what most police departments do as well.

      i guess that's the problem with buying off the shelf software to do your job rather than learning how things work for yourself.

  2. Only Meta-Data was damaged by imaginaryelf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Our analysis showed there to be damage to the lead-in section of the data," Keith Gnagey, vice president of professional services for i365, said in an e-mail statement about the recovery effort. That meant any attempt "with normal playing software would not be able to get past the beginning of the data."

    That's like the directory tree being messed up but the data being intact.

    I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

    1. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by RiffRafff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

      Really. I wonder what the names of those two firms are, so we'll know who NOT to go to.

      --
      "I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
    2. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by sith · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Almost sounds like a DVD that wasn't finalized in a direct-to-dvd camcorder.

    3. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by Compholio · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Almost sounds like a DVD that wasn't finalized in a direct-to-dvd camcorder.

      I don't know about that, but I've run into this problem when there's dust on the disk when it's recorded. The laser etches the dust rather than the media, resulting in a disk that's got a small blank section.

    4. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by Belial6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      When my father owned a computer shop, he would regularly get people trying to sell him software that would let him do "data recovery". There was no way my father was qualified to do data recovery. He eventually focused only on printer repair because he found he wasn't really qualified to even do most PC work. That didn't stop the sales guys from trying to convince him that if he bought their software, he would do fine in the "data recovery" field.

      So, it doesn't surprise me that two local data recovery firms got stumped. They probably ran the software they bought against the DVD and when nothing came up, they said it was unrecoverable.

    5. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by bigjarom · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm interested to know how you came to this conclusion. Did you find the laser-etched dust particle on the finished disk?

      Maybe you could send the dust to Seagate Recovery Service to get that blank section back.

    6. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by Compholio · · Score: 4, Informative

      I noticed after burning the disk that there was dust on the bottom (a lot of it concentrated in one spot). So, I blew it off and the part where the dust used to be was distinctly the "not burned" color. For shits and giggles I tried the disk anyway and there were a bunch of inaccessible files. Since I noticed it right away I just chucked the disk and made a new one (I was working with data on a PC). This happened quite a while ago, but if you're curious I could attempt to intentionally reproduce it.

    7. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by the_womble · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe the headline should read "incompetent data recovery nearly lets rapist get away"

    8. Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually that makes me think of a hair brained scheme. The finger print is essentially a mask applied to the data. Your eyes can see it but the DVD drive error corrects it away because there are enough gaps in the mask where the original data 'shows through' for the error correction to correct away the errors.

      Now it seems like if you could record raw data you could make a DVD with a pattern visible to the naked eye but invisible to the DVD reader. So rather than waiting ages and buying expensive media for things like Lightscribe or Labelflash you could burn both the data and the label at the same time and on any media. Unlike DiscT@2 which burned logos on the data side of the disk, the space can be used for both logo and data at the same time.

      You could do it with arbitrary bitmaps too - take the bitmap and make holes in it through which enough data shows through to make the disk readable. The burning software could do this with a mask cunningly constructed to make enough holes even in a solid bitmap to make the disk readable. Hell you could let the user select the tradeoff between image quality and error margin.

      There's a a downside of course, the more solid the image the more the error correction will be stressed even for a disc which can be read perfectly. It seems like a disc burned with this technology would be less resistant to scratches and fingerprints.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  3. Re:That third house wasn't ILM was it? (not a joke by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

    in a day where a few people in their basement can render decent cgi, I'm wondering if this "third firm" was not hired to do a little "extraordinary rendering"

    For best results, one should loosen their tin-foil hat occasionally.

    Just sayin'.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  4. Re:Tinfoil hat eh? by jackbird · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the GP overestimates the state of the art in 3D rendering and animation. I don't think any team anywhere could fake a video like that to the satisfaction of the people who were actually there. Much less do it in secret on a DA's budget.

  5. Disc wasn't finalized by CyberZCat · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a very common problem that happens when a disc isn't finalized on both audio CDs and video DVDs that are recorded on direct to disc consumer recording systems. After a the actual data is written what is a essentially a "table of contents" has to be written at the beginning of the disc, otherwise you get the "blank disc" effect as describe here. That two separate data specialists couldn't figure this out is rather concerning...

  6. Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all! by gnick · · Score: 4, Funny

    While I am shocked, I am not that surprised at all.

    ...and I am puzzled as to how that works out!

    It's easy:
    1) Turn on a lamp.
    2) Remove the light bulb.
    3) With your left-hand forefinger, touch the silver-colored outer shielding where the light bulb screws in.
    4) With your right-hand forefinger, touch the contact at the bottom of the receptacle.

    Sorry, no "???" nor "profit", but you'll be shocked without being surprised. Hope that helps.

    =)

    --
    He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  7. Re:Dust on media by Chris+Tucker · · Score: 5, Funny

    Usually it's physical contact first, THEN the tissue.

    --
    Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
  8. Re:HOW was Only Meta-Data was damaged? by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Informative

    Probably, yeah. In the worst case, though, the disc might have gotten finalized incorrectly (e.g. using a bad optical drive), in which case even the original DVD burner might not play it....

    The lead-in area (at least for the first session) is the innermost recordable portion of the media. If something went wrong in media fabrication, I'd expect that to be the second-most likely part to have problems, second only to the outer edge (which fails verification frequently in cheap media). So this could have been a media defect as well.

    I'm not surprised the Seagate folks were able to recover the data. This pales compared with what the Seagate recovery folks deal with every day--head crashes, surface mount desoldering and replacing defective head preamps, maybe even electron microscope recovery of shattered platters.... Compared with that, a few bad blocks in the lead-in of a DVD is downright trivial and might even be recoverable without hacking the drive firmware....

    That said, I sure would like to know who the two companies are that couldn't figure this out so I can never send anything to them.... :-)

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  9. Re:Help! by eh2o · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Quite simple. *Never* talk to the police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik