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Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence
An anonymous reader writes An Indiana court has ruled that a hard drive that was sent to recycling was not destruction of evidence. The ruling stems from a BitTorrent file-sharing case filed by Malibu Media where a defendant claimed that his hard drive had failed thanks to heavy use. Malibu claimed that the act was destruction of evidence and filed a motion demanding a default judgement. The court denied this motion suggesting that because the hard drive failed, there was no evidence to destroy in the first place.
- person uses drive for illegal activity
- police raids and collects drive
- somehow drive gets destroyed by 'person'?
Or the other way around:
- person uses drive for illegal activity
- drive gets destroyed by 'person'
- police raids and collects broken drive
Does this imply that it is illegal to destroy any evidence while doing criminal activities? e.g., illegal to wear gloves to avoid finger-prints when murdering people?
That requires the plaintiff to spend money to have the analysis done which isn't part of the copyright extortion business plan.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker didn't like this tactic. He froze eleven of Malibu's cases in western Wisconsin, and ordered Malibu's lawyer to explain why she shouldn't be sanctioned for violating court rules. Filing paperwork with the Court with no purpose except to harass or embarrass an opponent is a big no-no. Judge Crocker wondered why Malibu would file a list of movies with embarrassing titles that Malibu doesn't own and can't sue over.
https://www.eff.org/cases/mali...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Depends on just how motivated someone is to recover the old data. The hard drive itself will almost certainly be unable to read the previous data after a single overwrite, but remove the platters and install them in a machine specifically designed to read the edge of the tracks, which as a rule *aren't* overwritten, and most of the data can generally be recovered easily enough. (Since head placement is imperfect, every recording of a track writes to a slightly different path, leaving the previous N recordings partially untouched)
Granted, there's going to need to be suspicion of some pretty important data on that hard drive for it to be worth the trouble, but if there has ever been data on a drive that may be of sufficient interest to someone with the resources to recover it, then you absolutely need to do multiple overwrites with random noise to ensure it can't be recovered. And/or physically destroy the platters by melting, not shattering (though that would probably have to be some *really* important data to be worth reconstructing a shattered platter)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
older non-PMR drives
Those drives are now museum artifacts, so your concern is of no practical use. No mainstream 2.5/3.5 in. hard drive manufactured in the last 15 years is recoverable after a zero-out.
Of course, an extra few words explaining that due to areal density on drives larger than 15 GB the chances of recovering a single 32-bit number from a zeroed drive is less than three percent would make you seem less like a dick spouting such an assertion. Residual magnetism used to be the way they recovered data from a zero out, but due to how tiny the bits are on the media these days it's not possible to do that, even after a single pass of zeroes.
Melting is a new one for me, but quite effective I am sure. Me, I still prefer a drill press, much more physically satisfying and environmentally friendly. And yes, I have applied power to the drive so the platters shatter and shred when I do it. Just make sure you clamp the drive down first. He he