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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...
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.
Red sleeves.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Yep. To quote the article: "When people frantically begin shredding sensitive documents and deleting computer files and smashing flash drives and chasing garbage trucks at 2 a.m. ... it is not because they have been operating legitimately," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
Ahhh the old "if you are innocent, then you shouldn't have a right to privacy" argument.
Obviously I disagree.
I'd destroy my hard drive too if I got word the government was coming. They don't need to know that I donated to wikileaks and other projects.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
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!
IANAL; but my understanding is that it doesn't constitute an admission of guilt per se(particularly in these days of high-capacity hard drives, there would be no reasonable way to bound the number of things you could have been guilty of with just one HDD...); but, destruction of evidence and/or "obstruction of justice" are typically crimes in themselves.
If they have a recording of you describing how you ripped apart and surreptitiously disposed of your HDD after you heard that the feds were on your trail, those charges are going to be very hard to dodge...
Merely destroying your hard drive, out of caution or paranoia, and then learning later that the feds would really have liked to have a look through it, is one thing; but if you are caught on tape describing why you destroyed it, game over, man.
True, but, were I in their shoes, I'd have to ask myself:
1. Does acting strangely (i.e., throwing my hard drives in random garbage trucks) prove my guilt in the case?
2. If there is evidence on those hard drives that probably would prove my guilt, which is the lesser sentence: obstruction or whatever I'll get charged with if they find smokinggun.jpg on those drives?
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After thoroughly eradicating all trace of evidence, he then told someone else what he had done. Brilliant.
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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.
at the risk of suffering 5000 degree flamewar posts...
There *IS* some (small) evidence that being a rapist is at least partially genetically based. (rather, a predisposition to being a rapist that is.)
In such cases, I would say the impulse is mother nature's fault. The decision to act, is the purpetrator's.
(Much like mother nature is at fault for our desire to eat sweet things, but our reaching into the cookie jar when we know better is OUR fault.)
Now, that aside-- White collar criminals who destroy thousands of people's lives so they can live in obscene luxury deserve not only to be devested of said luxuries, but to be treated like the criminals they are. That does not mean I advocate prison rape or the like-- even serial killers shouldnt be subjected to cruel and unusual punishments or conditions in the penal system-- it just means that they should be put away and prevented from doing any further harm.
if they prove deliberate destruction of evidence, doesn't that constitute admission of guilt? or some other loss-by-default?
No, but it does allow the prosecutor to give the jury instructions that they may make a adverse inference[1] as to the contents of the destroyed relevant evidence from the fact that the defendant knowingly (sometimes even negligently) destroyed it. Essentially, they are telling the jury that they can infer that the evidence would weaken the defendant's case from the fact that he willfully destroyed it.[2] The jury is not required to make such an inference but it may -- as contrasted from the fact that prosecutors are forbidden from trying to make adverse inferences from a refusal to testify based on 5A grounds, such jury instructions would be illegal and the whole conviction overturned.
This is a very onerous instruction and so is reserved for cases in which it was shown that the destruction was knowing or negligent but it's necessary in order for the discovery system to work. In the absence of a adverse inference rule, litigants would have a very strong incentive to preemptively destroy any incriminating evidence as soon as they became aware of an investigation or a lawsuit. In cases against corporations in which internal emails/documents play a pivotal role in proving that the behavior was part of a pattern/policy of the company (and not merely a rogue employee) this would be fatal to the plaintiff/State. The same logic applies in cases against the State[3] where they refuse to disclose evidence that might be favorable to the defendant.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
[2] http://vegaslitigator.com/blog/?cat=50 (discussing the Nevada statute, not the Federal one, but many parallels and the same basic concepts exist).
[3] http://legalholds.typepad.com/legalholds/2009/04/negligent-destruction-of-evidence-is-sufficient-to-support-an-adverse-inference-instruction-although.html An interesting case in which police destruction of evidence helps to get defendants off the hook because they allege that the destroyed evidence would undermine the State's case. IOW, the adverse-inference doctrine cuts both for and against the State. The defendants did eventually convince the court that the radio communications were relevant.
The distinction (problem) isn't street thug vs. white collar. It's with the victims. With a street thug, there's one victim, one person bearing all of the injury. It's really easy to look at that one person, feel the emotional weight of the injury, and decide the perpetrator needs to be punished.. With white collar crime, the injury is distributed over dozens, hundreds, sometimes millions of victims. So even though the sum total of the injury may be much greater than the sum total of the injury caused by the street thug, there is little to no emotional impact. People still see it as "well, that spam only cost me 5 seconds of my life, so no big deal." So the punishments tend to be much less severe.
Guess what? 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. It's just that the injury is distributed instead of concentrated on one place. The average lost productivity to society is the same.
Having spoken to some survivors of those camps, I think you paint an overly civilized picture of them.
The children were sent to what could properly be called "retraining schools" to encourage them into politically correct beliefs. Their property was stolen, and never repaid. Etc.
OTOH, you are correct. They were "internment camps", and most people survived them. They might have become impoverished and be forced to work as farm laborers, but they did live through the experience. Most of them.
Saying they were given homes is painting a very pretty picture on the actuality, but it's not totally false. Quite. Similarly for the rest of your statements.
But you are right, they weren't extermination camps. They were essentially POW camps for citizens of the US. And as far as I have been able to figure out the entire purpose of them was to allow the wealth of those so interred to be confiscated by others with powerful political connections. (You might notice that Hawaii, which had a larger proportion of Japanese citizens than did California didn't need or use any such camps. Nor were the German citizens on the east cost treated so. It appears to have been legalized racial discrimination for the purpose of confiscating wealth.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.