Slashdot Mirror
Insider-Trading Suspects Smash Hard Drive Evidence
An anonymous reader writes "We all know Slashdotters love debating the best way to wipe a hard drive clean. Looks like tech-savvy Wall Street Hedge Fund managers also know the best way to do it. From the WSJ article: 'Mr. Longueuil's version of that night's events was recorded later, during a December meeting with former colleague Mr. Freeman, who by then was cooperating with the government and recording conversations, according to the U.S. complaint. "F—in' pulled the external drives apart," Mr. Longueuil told Mr. Freeman during their meeting, according to the criminal complaint. "Put 'em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m. 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket, and leave the apartment and I go on like a twenty block walk around the city and try to find a, a garbage truck and threw the s—t in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks four different garbage trucks."'"
Perhaps we shouldn't be whining about tech-clueless management after all... This seems like a much worse alternative. On the plus side, he probably didn't even think about the mailserver backups...
I have heard of people getting hit with destruction of evidence charges for engaging in this sort of behavior...
Palm trees and 8
Encryption seems a bit more foolproof. It's also a bit more believable that one might "forget" a lengthy passphrase, while physical destruction looks a bit suspicious.
That said, encryption and physical destruction is also useful, as it means that even if someone gets some of the physical components of the disk, it will be even more difficult to get any data off of them.
So they should continue to receive the lighter sentences. Right? It shouldn't matter that the impact of their crime was the ruination of thousands of lives. Putting these guys in with common thugs is just cruel.
I'd have made a clean system image via clonezilla when I first got issued my machine, then just swap the incriminating HDD for a clean imaged one.
Red sleeves.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
if they prove deliberate destruction of evidence, doesn't that constitute admission of guilt? or some other loss-by-default?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So what do we learn kids? Don't talk about the skeezy shit you do to anyone: friend, family, coworker, or other. If you do bad shit, keep it to yourself.
At the small town bars I used to hang out in we had a saying, "Loose lips get hit."
It would appear that the hammer of justice follows a similar rule of thumb.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
It would have been very nice if we could conclude, "But the joke was on him because a passing Google streetview truck intercepted, downloaded, cached and indexed the hard disk's data, all dressed up and ready to be data mined by the investigators..." But alas, no such luck.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And these guys are supposed to be incredibly brilliant? Good thing he used baggies. Wouldn't want them to get dirty in the trash.
Great so he destroyed everything he had, if he's the trader, then someone at the companies he traded in will know the information given to him.
Not only did he not get his own mailservers, he didn't get their mailservers, his accomplices hard drives, the coorperation of his colleague Mr. Freeman or anyone else that is going to turn evidence on him to get their own sentences commuted.
The Prisoners Dilemma in the 21st century: Everyone Encrypts (phones, emails, hard drives) and Nobody Talks. Otherwise somebody is going to have evidence pinned on them, then its just a race to be the first in line to rat the others out.
Why are there 2 seemingly identical versions of this story on the main page? This isn't the time-honored Slashdot tradtion of dupes from different editors who didn't check with each other, this is more clone than dupe, and it's been happening a lot every since this horrible new design was rolled out.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
After thoroughly eradicating all trace of evidence, he then told someone else what he had done. Brilliant.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Does anyone else think that the quote sounds like one of those fake quotes you see in mail hoaxes? For instance, why would he say "I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket", which adds nothing to the story but is something a hoaxer would put in if he saw photos of Longueuil wearing North Face products. Besides, maybe the guy wasn't a Rhodes Scholar, but I have a hard time believing the managing director of a capital management firm speaks like a valley girl.
I'm not saying he's innocent, just that this news item doesn't look right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What value are these individuals creating?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's a Sicilian Message: your hard drive sleeps with the fishes. Toss the hard drives into the Atlantic from your yacht. Let the salt water take care of the rest. Or encase them into cement at a construction site. The old, time-tested methods are the best.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If you're not using encryption to protect evidence more incriminating that the mere use of encryption itself, you need to up your game.
Are you on Crack? Traders are the bottom feeders of society. They produce absolutely nothing of value, destroy companies and ruin lives all for the sake of a quarter point. Never before in history have so many gotten so rich on the backs of others while contributing nothing back to society
..that all end up in the same landfill. I'm sure the feds won't have any problems collecting all the pieces. Also I doubt they dismantled the drives down to the platters and scattered the platters.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"We all know Slashdotters love debating the best way to wipe a hard drive clean. Looks like tech-savvy Wall Street Hedge Fund managers also know the best way to do it. From the WSJ article: 'Mr. Longueuil's version of that night's events was recorded later, during a December meeting with former colleague Mr. Freeman, who by then was cooperating with the government and recording conversations, according to the U.S. complaint. "F—in' pulled the external drives apart," Mr. Longueuil told Mr. Freeman during their meeting, according to the criminal complaint. "Put 'em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m. 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket, and leave the apartment and I go on like a twenty block walk around the city and try to find a, a garbage truck and threw the s—t in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks four different garbage trucks."'"
We usually mean banks or the exchange when we speak about Wall Street. If you need a location-based idiom for Hedge Funds, Greenwich CT works. Or Mayfair if you're in London. And yes, banks are different from Hedge Funds. Don't mix up your villains please.
So they should continue to receive the lighter sentences. Right?
Lindsay Lohan seems to get off with no jail time at all.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Dammit. These are the people who give Republicans a bad name!
If it's not Consolidated Lint it's just fuzz!
I suppose one could feed the troll with something along this line:
Insider traders know what's going on in a company, and thus have a better idea of where the stock price should be. The right stock price would signal to society which enterprises are worthwhile investments, which stops wastage on the wrong investments, and encourages investment in the right ones. This clearly has value.
Anyway, I don't really want to go into why it's bad for some people to trade on insider information. Seems a bit trite.
Surely you are not so dense that you are unable to tell the difference between a Winner and a Cheater. Both can make billions of dollars but their methods are high class versus low class. Just because you make a lot of money doesn't mean everything you do is legal or honest.
We like listening to your paranoid libertarian-esque prattle.
As a libertarian, I take offense - we are individualistic but reasonable and realistic.
The kind of derangement on display comes only from those on the hardest right and hardest left, the intersection of Birthers and Truthers smelted into a big pot of crazy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I probably would have went with forgot pass as hey pete suggested on encrypted and after 2 or 3 attempts call it a security measure when it runs a script to wipe the drive as an added measure .Or atleast how much the average tech hears that excuse .He couldn't have been that bright as the guy stated plastic baggies if he didn't take that walk all the time that would kind of be a tip off ....he might have been better off to stick it down storm drains added water and rust,,The vermin and water would do his work for him .
between naughty deeds and the i didn't go to a porn site claims . one should really take a poll to see how many people actually claim they hadn't
Come on guys, this is slashdot.
And why did he put them in separate baggies? To preserve his fingerprints?
I would take the platters and make of few runs on them with a fly mill. Recover that!
When I destroy a drive, I usually have a hole in the plan. I drill right through the platters, then drop the drive down a garbage chute.
Fight Spammers!
You're posting on Slashdot, and you actually think asking people not to reply telling you the giant hole in your plan will work?
Step 1) Buy a bunch of Seagate drives and install in them in a RAID backup, connect to system and wait the required week for all drives to fail.
Step 2) ???
Step 3) PROFIT!!!
I Oxy-Propane torch my old ones into a blob of molten crap good luck with recovering that.
Got Code?
It didn't have to be incrimninating. It was still evidence.
In fact, did they receive a discovery notice, or have reason to believe they would?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If the guy had that important kind of data, then I would think that he would keep it and use it to blackmail money from other people far richer than he to truly get a pay day. I would take all of the drives, carefully store them somewhere non-obvious, and then blab ferociously how I destroyed the drives. The price for destroying evidence would seem to be far less than the actual crimes you are guilty of. The potential benefit to make sure the information didn't reach the public would be worth millions.
Bearded Dragon
I say they take off and nuke the entire drives from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s1MspmfEwg
As for the idiot in question, yes, there's backups of this guy's stuff online and elsewhere - he's not getting off. Nothing you do via email or online or blackberry/etc is ever "gone". And the courts assume you're guilty as charged if they catch you destroying evidence like this. The penalties for destruction of electronic data in legal cases are quite severe, as in simply proceed to arbitrary judgment and sentencing, because you just lost your case. Shoot, the penalties for simply not keeping adequate backups of such data are almost as bad.
But for normal data deletion, my favorite method is to take off the cover, remove or park the head mechanism, and dump in a teaspoon or so of diatamaceous earth. Let the motor spin for a minute or so. This is best done if you prepare beforehand and have the screws off. Get it running, park the heads, dump the sand/etc in and quickly close the cover. Makes impressive noises as well. Always a hit with bystanders. :)
Sometimes I take the platters apart and rub them with some sandpaper. Then there's always the 5 lb sledgehammer, though glass fragments can be an issue. (sharp doesn't begin to cover platter material - it's tempered and simply brutal stuff to try to clean up)
What's your favorite way to take care of your old drives?
Get a large Electro-Magnet. Like a Bulk Mag Tape Eraser.. It'll wipe out the drive quickly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcjMDfx4G_A
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I was there in the mid-90s when this behavior was beginning to wind down, but still going on. We saw coke-sniffing in the bathrooms (I don't recall seeing the drug dealers anywhere). Our company favored wrestlers (if I recall correctly one fellow had an Olympic bronze in Greco-Roman), and nobody sought the cerebral types. I would say the drinking culture was still very heavy.
The whole thing has calmed down a lot since electronic trading took over almost everything -- no longer do you need to physically push the other fellow aside to get the trade. Nowadays even golf isn't really that common a pursuit. London was always more extreme and stayed wild a bit longer I hear.
Of course, some might argue that the world economy was better off when traders were dumb jocks rather than clever eggheads who know what a hard drive platter is.
I don't think it is valid to multiply 5 sec x 100 million spam recipients and conclude that one spam mailing costs society as much as a murder. Would the recipients really have gotten 5 sec more work done, and would those seconds add up to any actual benefit to society.
For that matter, how many spam mailings have been sent worldwide since the start of the internet? By the reasoning of your post, once the spammers have sent more mailings than there are people on earth, spam will have caused as much harm to human society as the extinction of the planet.
Darik's boot and nuke. It's what I use whenever I want to hide my shady stock market trades...I mean...delete old church sermons.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Put 'em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m. 2 a.m. on a Friday night... try to find a, a garbage truck and threw the s—t in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks four different garbage trucks.
Yup, almost sounds like him.
bootable DVD and no hard drive perfectly reasonable with no history
Interesting idea but shashdotters will deduct points because he didn't use an open source garbage truck....
Our forebears, men like John Quincy Adams, worked tirelessly until slavery was extinguished. - Michelle Bachmann
I get the attempt at humor and any and all politicians are fair game. But perhaps Bachmann did something few expected and actually made an accurate historical reference:
"Adams was elected a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts after leaving office, the only president ever to do so, serving for the last 17 years of his life with far greater success than he had achieved in the presidency. Animated by his growing revulsion against slavery, Adams became a leading opponent of the Slave Power and argued that if a civil war ever broke out the president could abolish slavery by using his war powers, a correct prediction of Abraham Lincoln's use of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Adams predicted the dissolution of the Union on the slavery issue, though he mistakenly predicted that if the South became independent there would be a series of bloody slave insurrections.[" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams
Use knopix cd for OS. No hard drive needed.
Only put information on a CD or dvd
Keep the stack of DVD's on a spindle in a microwave with a analog timer IE you only have to plug it in when the timer is turned on for the thing to turn on.
Have this on a good battery backup.
Have a power on switch or a 6 way adapter running to the microwave. If anything hits the fan you hit the button all the DVD's are fried through and through. Makes pretty collors as well. ;)
Truly sir, 20 mils == 508 microns. Make sure you're protected.
Insider trading also refers to trades made between insiders to drive up the amount of shares being traded. This can make it appear that a stock is getting a lot of activity and hence generate interest and a rise in the price of the stock. Which can then be manipulated by the insiders to sell their shares at the inflated price.
A quick example:
Bob and Jim are buddies who own lots of stock in the same company. They collude with each other to sell their shares back and forth for increasingly higher prices such that they both neither gain or lose money and shares. They do this in such a way that it is not immediately apparent to any outsiders.
Dave an outsider doesn't know who is selling or buying the stock he just sees lots of trading activity and that the price is steadily climbing. Not wanting to be left out in the cold on what appears to be a hot stock he jumps at the chance to buy all the shares he can afford when he has a chance to at a price above yesterday's value but slightly lower than the most current trade, which was offered by Bob or Jim.
Bob and Jim find enough Dave's to sell their stock to at the price that they have artificially inflated it to and take a vacation. The stock settles back to where it was and all those Daves instantly have less value than they thought they were purchasing.
This can actually be pulled off by a single share holder if they are clever enough with using proxies and what not. This kind of con is part of what led to the creation of the SEC. And the way our market's transactions are handled today are specifically geared to make this harder to accomplish.
Evidence of what, exactly?
I mean, really, in order for destruction of evidence to stand against someone, doesn't it have to be evidence of something that was actually illegal?
For example, I can burn my grocery receipts in my fireplace at home, but destroying evidence that I purchased them... but purchasing them was not against the law, so destroying the evidence of that is not illegal.
While admittedly what this person did may be suspicious, I would think they would need some actual reason to believe that the stuff he destroyed would have actually proved some real wrongdoing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ok, if this was a private citizen, not SEC related, I don't see how this is "obstruction of justice". I own a HDD. I can destroy it as I like. Whenever I like. It is too bad if the data on it is something someone else wants. This is why corporations need document destruction policies and need to force emails to be wiped constantly. email should never be a "system of record." Diskless workstations, yep, that's the answer.
a) Encrypt everything with a long-ass passphrase (50+ character) using truecrypt
b) 4 drilled holes from a power drill into the disk drive
Call that destroyed.
I've accidentally desctroyed HDDs by dropping it while it was running. It never worked again - used the drill on that one just to be certain any sensitive data was unavailable - you know, like my quicken data.
So if this was SEC laws, then I bet there's something in those rule that prevent deletion of any transactions.
So don't be so quick to judge a horse who is hundreds of miles from her new destinations, when the other horses are still struggling to leave the derelict barn.
A glue factory?
"For example, I can burn my grocery receipts in my fireplace at home, but destroying evidence that I purchased them... but purchasing them was not against the law, so destroying the evidence of that is not illegal."
Absolutely. But if you were being investigated for securites fraud, and the SEC notified you of that, destroying any of your business records would probably fall under the heading of destroying evidence, and I suspect you're in hot water.
And in today's environment, your personal email is not off limits. Not evern your phone records, expecially your emails to and from your phone.
In fact, I suspect that SEC regs states that you're supposed to preserve these records, so that's probably enough for administrative action. These guys went way past that. There are situations in securities law where the records are important, whether they confirm or disprove your guilt or innocence.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So, the Phantom Menace grossed $430 million in the US at approx $6 a ticket, or 72 million views at two hours... Mrs Lucas's little boy wiped out two million. And that was just viewing the damn thing.
Pro'ly by all the front-doors slammed in his face by the victims in his serial ... I only watched. He did it.
I prefer a generous amount of thermite to permanently erase (melt) hard drive data. 100% effective in less than 20 seconds.
I think we should put Anonymous in charge of the Internet. They're not perfect, but at least with them the definitions of Free Speech would not be "The freedom to say what you want - so long as we agree with it". .nazi since they know better than to be offended by speech, but that's a price I'm more than willing to pay.
True, they would allow any kind of domain, even
DBAN is probably the best tool for the job - quick AND easy.
However, He may not have had time. Sometimes it really is a case of pull the hardware out and run.
If you do have time, Truecrypt can be a very useful tool for removing data. At the very least, it could make data recovery quite expensive.
Nothing beats power tools and strong chemicals.
I used to pull old drives apart and use the magnets, spacers, hard drive platters and other bits from the drive to make a wind chime (or a wind clang .. depending on your point of view).
First of all, the hard drives get a format, then get encrypted a couple of times, then get a good scouring, finally, random holes punched through various locations with a drill - for aesthetic purposes (of course).
Watching them hang outside in the rain, rusting away, thinking that one day someone may feel the need to take them down and try and get the data off of the platters is always a good upper.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Am I the only one to notice that the title and the summary talks about hard drives, but Mr. Longueuil is described in the details as have ripped apart flash drives with pliers?
The government have massive resources to acquire evidence. Disallowing adverse inference will put the game back in balance in favor of the little guy, a protection provided by the 5th amendment.
If the prosecution thinks they have a case and will win, they should not need to worry about defendants destroying any evidence.
New Economic Perspectives
5 seconds per spam * 10 spams which get past the filters * 100 million recipients works out to 158 man-years of time lost. The sum total of the injury caused by this spammer is actually greater than killing a person.
Ouch. Your arithmetic doesn't compute here. That's reducing the "worth" of a person's life to the (work?) time ot this life.
Do you want to go there? I don't.
A man walking round throwing stuff into 'garbage trucks' at 2 am is drawing attention to himself in a way that a man casually disposing of bags into litter bins in daylight is not.
Good example. FYI this trick used to be legal. Have a look at the book "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefebvre.
Wow, this was the stupidest way to get rid of an incriminating drive. Seriously, I do this with really old drives that I can't be bothered wiping, but this is the sort of thing you should be wiping.
Additionally, it doesn't even take much. Just get Darik's Boot And Nuke then boot from it, et viola.
Also remember, while DoD level security sounds awesome, I know from experience, one random pass is enough. If you don't believe me, you can read about it here page 1, page 2. It explains electron microscopes (the boogeyman of secure wiping), and other methods, will not, in all likelihood, be able to reliably retrieve, such that it could be entered into evidence.
Seriously, so stupid. Besides that, encrypt from the get go, and you're as good as done!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
killdisk x4
or keep two hot swappable drives, one with, one without. So there's no gaping void in the case. (idiots)