Is Bev examining the black box harddrives?

[lthuedk]

They can't be entirely erased.

[salvorhardin]

1. Forensic analysis of hard drives

is very expensive. It's also unlikely that Bev and her group could obtain the original hard drives, especially since the voting machine companies claim copyright protection on their code, thus that it's proprietary and property of their respective companies.

Where a forensic analysis would be really interesting is the memory cards the votes were recorded to on the individual machines.

[bearfan454]

2. The index.dat files can be erased with several free programs.

I use it.

[salvorhardin]

4. Data on hard drives

can be recovered even after a so-called secure wipe. It's a very expensive procedure though.

[indy_azcat]

3. it's pretty easy to do a military scrub and write 0's to the whole thing.

n/t

[jsamuel]

5. I doubt they went through that much trouble

I think they deleted things, but I doubt they cleaned it. That would take forever to do and they needed those computers up. plus... more reasons.. tired .... sleepy .... bed

[indy_azcat]

6. i've got a zap

program from the early nineties from IBM that'll do an 80 GB drive in under 5 min. But I agree that they are more likely too lazy or incompetent to do any such thing (especially after reading Bev Harris' florida post!).

[wlubin]

7. Hard drives can be entirely erased. All you have to do is write all zeros

onto the hard rive, and then write all ones onto it, and then write alternating zeros and ones such as 010101010101............. and then write zeros and ones such as 10101010101010........... or something like that, and then forensics can't even find anything. What you are thinking of is that when you delete something on your windows machine, the file you deleted is not actually deleted, i.e., is not written over, but the computer is told that the space that the file takes up on the hard rive is available, and can be written over in the future. But you can get a program such as one called shredder that will do the write over as discussed above so that the file can never be retrieved after it is shredded. In other words, yes the hard drives may have been erased.

[lthuedk]

8. The erasure then, would be circumstantial evidence, would it not?

I suspect the hdds will be subpoena'd if a criminal suit is filed.

[wlubin]

9. yeah i think it would. But maybe they could erase and then reinstall, and

if the operating system does not date the installation, i would guess that no one would ever know.

GET RID OF THESE GOD DAMN MACHINES!!

[bullimiami]

10. the trick of replacing the data file

would be able to be uncovered by forensics though.


youd have to get them impounded as evidence first.

[bmoney07]

11. FOIA's

The FOIA's don't cover the harddrives? maybe I'm stupid/niave but I thought that the FOIA's covered everything?

[lthuedk]

12. If this matter goes criminal, expect more than just hdds.

A suit seems to smoke out the weak links, including whistle blowers who may have had a hand in hardware/software manipulation. If Diebold becomes a co-defendant, we might get some meaningful discovery.

One question: Would a suit trump copyright &/or give the defendant(s) a route to the Supreme Court?