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Thread: 1,008 hours

  1. #21
    Teacher Paul F's Avatar
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    I know very little about the proposed extension but I am curious as to how those against it would solve the problem - assuming the problem exists.

    I cant believe that all this is being pushed through the house of commons without, so called experts, speaking up with alternatives.

    Does anyone know what alternatives were proposed?

  2. #22
    Formerly known as DavidJames David Bailey's Avatar
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by under par View Post
    What has really amazed me over the lat 11 years is how right wing and authoratarian the Labour government has been.
    I know, it's weird, isn't it?

    When a "rabidly right-wing" Tory is protesting against the erosion of civil liberties against a Labour government, and when he's supported by Liberty and (effectively) the Lib Dems... It's just weird beyond weirdness, that's all I can say.

    Davis is eccentric, and he's probably just killed his political career, but I think he's also a little heroic.

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by David Bailey View Post
    See, that's the bit I don't get. Surely the fact that this information is available digitally, rather than on paper, should make it easier to retrieve, not more difficult?
    Yes it is. In days gone by the documents behind criminal activity would be sifted through manually by a team of people. Now it can be automated and should be far quicker, only in the minority of cases will there be extra work of trying to salvage deleted files or bypass encryption.


    But I don't think we should pass legislation, especially legislation which infringes civil liberties, to compensate for a system's inefficiencies. Surely the better (if less sexy) solution is to improve the system to remove those delays?
    That would be a great idea I'm assuming the SLA for these outsourced forensic IT companies read "you'll get it by Tuesday"

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by David Bailey View Post

    Davis is eccentric, and he's probably just killed his political career, but I think he's also a little heroic.
    I dunno, I'm tempted to vote Tory now as the left wing alternative to the status quo

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by David Bailey View Post
    See, that's the bit I don't get. Surely the fact that this information is available digitally, rather than on paper, should make it easier to retrieve, not more difficult?


    That's amazing to hear- you learn something new every day.

    I can readily believe that there's such a delay - that's beaurocracy for you. But I don't think we should pass legislation, especially legislation which infringes civil liberties, to compensate for a system's inefficiencies. Surely the better (if less sexy) solution is to improve the system to remove those delays?
    I'm not saying it is easier of harder just that there may well be xxx hours of cctv to be viewed.... xxx mobile phones be located then the records and triangulation co-ordinates to be to be checked... xxx X xxx forensic samples to be obtained .. then checked foresically, xxx witnesses to be sought and once found interviewed using xxxxx officers on house to house enquiries. then there are the indexers who x-reference the xxxx thousands of exhibits /statements/bits of evidence. Oh and if an atrocity has occurred then there is also the nice task of forensically picking up the bits of xxx dead people and gathering evidence for HM Coroner as well as the lovely job of visiting the next of kin of xxx dead people and informing them ... Oh an provide family liasson officer per victim
    AND then get round to interviewing the suspect of course.


    Because we have DNA technology the forensic samples seized are of vast in number. A suspect arrested for terrorism will often spend the first 2-3 hours being secured to protect forensics, hands bagged and tagged , suspect will be suited in a paper overall suit to prevent loss of forensics from clothing. THEN he will be taken to the police station.... in a specially cleaned car normally a hire car to ensure no cross contamination issues.
    the suspect upon arrival will spend the 1st 3- 4 hours being forensically examined one finger at a time each hand producing 10-15 forensic samples each bagged and tagged and sealed up in presence of suspect. Each suspect produces dozens of forensic samples.


    I give you this inconclusive list in the hope that you will see that any police force that deals with any incident like this has much to do...... there are only so many officers and the more of these jobs that stack up... and they do snowball the more stretched the resources become.

    Oh for the days of Dixon of Dock Green.. " evening all!" and a missing dog enquiry......

  6. #26
    Formerly known as DavidJames David Bailey's Avatar
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by Paul F View Post
    I know very little about the proposed extension but I am curious as to how those against it would solve the problem - assuming the problem exists.
    I don't think the problem exists.

    Sir Ken McDonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, doesn't think the problem exists.

    Numerous other security experts don't think the problem exists.

    It's just gesture politics - Brown wants to look strong, tough on terror rather than on the causes of terror. He knows it'll never get through the Lords, anyhow. Again, the irony of relying on an unelected chamber to preserve civil liberties is quite amusing...

  7. #27
    Formerly known as DavidJames David Bailey's Avatar
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by under par View Post
    I'm not saying it is easier of harder just that there may well be xxx hours of cctv to be viewed.... xxx mobile phones be located then the records and triangulation co-ordinates to be to be checked... xxx X xxx forensic samples to be obtained .. then checked foresically, xxx witnesses to be sought and once found interviewed using xxxxx officers on house to house enquiries. then there are the indexers who x-reference the xxxx thousands of exhibits /statements/bits of evidence. Oh and if an atrocity has occurred then there is also the nice task of forensically picking up the bits of xxx dead people and gathering evidence for HM Coroner as well as the lovely job of visiting the next of kin of xxx dead people and informing them ... Oh an provide family liasson officer per victim
    AND then get round to interviewing the suspect of course.
    Yes, fair enough - so it's not so much gathering the data, it's that there's so much data to process, and that some of this processing (e.g. viewing CCTV footage) simply must be done manually, yes?

    Makes sense, I guess. Boy, watching untold hours of CCTV footage must be an exciting task.

    Although, given that only 3% of crimes are solved via CCTV, despite us having about 5 million CCTV cameras in the UK, you have to wonder whether it's worth it.


    Quote Originally Posted by under par View Post
    I give you this inconclusive list in the hope that you will see that any police force that deals with any incident like this has much to do...... there are only so many officers and the more of these jobs that stack up... and they do snowball the more stretched the resources become.
    Sure, very informative. But we're not criticising the police - although, let's face it, if any of us were offered another 2 weeks to do your job, we'd kind of be in favour of it - we're criticising the politicians - well, let's be honest, Brown - for this colossal waste of effort for a pointless and doomed-to-failure bill.

    It's ID cards all over again...

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    With video and images - you would have to put it into context yourself,
    To me, there's the problem with computer forensic science, it smacks of manipulation. I, along no doubt with DS and many others, can manipulate images and their meta data to make it look as if I'm in the company of anyone I choose and at any time or date. I'm quite sure a computer forensic scientist could manipulate retrieved image/document evidence to suit whatever the police/state wanted.

    Anyone remember the discredited fingerprint "experts" of SCRO who tried to frame former PC Shirley McKie by manipulating fingerprint evidence to show she was at a crime scene when she was adamant she wasn't; that cost the tax payer £750,000 in compensation to Ms McKie.

    I may sound paranoid but it's not paranoia when they really are out to get you! and I'm not even going to go into Low Copy Number DNA !!

  9. #29
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by RedFox View Post

    I have to agree with your concerns, Brian and Barry. It's yet another erosion of the rights of the citizen.

    Individually such steps may seem to some to be relatively unimportant, but collectively they do significantly increase the potential for a future police state:
    Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Civil Contingencies Act 2004, Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, Identity Cards Act 2006, ContactPoint, automatic number plate recognition enabled vehicle tracking, CCTV, telecoms & internet data retention legislation, the misuse of terrorism legislation, the weakening of the checks on the power of the prime minister ....

    Now where did I put my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four?
    The Civil Contingencies Act is a bloody disgrace and yet most people haven't heard of it and even less care. And don't get me started on ID cards.....

    Fascists! Come the revolution! *waves a small but perfectly formed fist*

  10. #30
    Juju
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov View Post
    Now what I want to know is - if an extra 6 weeks is indispensable - why is it necessary for those 6 weeks (as opposed to the usual 4 days) to be prior to charging the defendant?
    I'm no expert - but I did see David Davis (on GMTV ) saying that at present, once charged, a suspect can no longer be interviewed and that is one of the things that needs changing.

  11. #31
    Formerly known as DavidJames David Bailey's Avatar
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by David Bailey View Post
    When a "rabidly right-wing" Tory is protesting against the erosion of civil liberties against a Labour government, and when he's supported by Liberty and (effectively) the Lib Dems... It's just weird beyond weirdness, that's all I can say.
    .
    To add even more surreality to the mix, he may be opposed by Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of the Sun.

    Argh! The world's gone crazy!

  12. #32
    Registered User David Franklin's Avatar
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Disclaimer: nearly everything I know about security, I learned from reading Bruce Schneier and Slashdot. I've also intentionally avoided dwelling on things like hidden recovery partitions.

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    All this is academic of course, I would doubt there are any convictions made purely on files salvaged from partially deleted hard drives.
    According to the article I quoted, nobody has ever shown they can recover data from a multiply overwritten disk.

    My suspicion is that it you'd have a chance in a pornography case, because of how modern disk drives actually work.

    If you take a modern drive of, say, 120GB, then that drive actually holds 1 trillion bits of data, which are read by a tiny magnetic head flying over the drive at very high tolerances. In practice, not every one of those trillion bits is going to work, and as the drive ages, you get more bits that go wrong. Now the drive has lots of clever electronics (and mathematics) that mean that it can recover the data even when some of the bits are wrong. But it gets to a certain point, and the data is unreadable. So what a modern drive does is keep track of how 'difficult' it was to read an area of the disk, and if it gets difficult enough, it says "OK, that block might become completely unreadible soon - I'll mark it as 'bad' and use a different area instead".

    The key point is that that 'bad' block is now completely inaccessible to your computer system. Even a low level disk wipe(*) won't touch it: as far as the computer is concerned, it doesn't exist. But it is still accessible for a forensic investigator using special hardware.

    But the investigator has a problem: there aren't going to be many of these bad blocks (I have no idea how common they are, but I think we're talking 1 in 10000 at most). Now if you have 100GB of pornography on there, chances are, there's going to be a bad block from one of the images. If you "know" what files the suspect downloaded, or have a library of such files, you can search for a match. (If you don't, then I don't think there's much you can do - reconstructing an image from a few random blocks is going to be impossible).

    On the other hand, if you're talking terrorist emails, the size of the incriminating data is tiny, and you're going to need to win the lottery to find anything useful.

    Thats two things - yes running an erase program would be a good idea; you delete incriminating evidence with a "secure erase" to make sure its GONE but to do that with your INBOX and SENTBOX may be futile, by definition, the incriminating evidence there has already passed through lots of other computers, computers you have no control over.
    If you want to be secure with email, you'd encrypt everything and never store or transmit anything that wasn't encrypted. Provided the software is written and used properly, no disk recovery program is going to have a chance.

    For overwriting 7 times - quite a while, but as you suggest you can "secure erase" as you go rather than do the whole hard drive - and you have no reason to destroy mundane stuff, so why bother. (in fact erasing everything is bound to come up as "suspicious behaviour" by the prosecution)
    My guess would be that a partial erase is actually slower than a full one; you've got a lot of stopping and starting, and you have to do a read-modify-write cycle for the 'tail' block of every file. (Files will be written in blocks of 8192 bytes. A classic way to find 'deleted' data is for someone to delete a file, that then gets overwritten by some other document that's shorter, leaving some bytes from what was there previously. The only way to avoid this is to read the file, pad with random data till you get to the end of the block, and then write it back. Which is slow).

    There are also lots of places on the disk where data might be stored that won't be deleted by a simple partial erase; the swap partition in particular, and also any file that the OS is actively using at the time.

    Well no, it depends on how much you have to erase Interestingly British Military policy on magnetic media is that when it is due to be decommissioned or it breaks, it will be logically destroyed then physically destroyed - just to be sure
    Or "Thermite for the win", as people like to jokingly say.

    (*) Some modern drives have a "secure erase" mode where the drive itself "controls" the wiping of all the data on the drive. As far as I know, this erases absolutely everything on the drive.

  13. #33
    Juju
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by techy types
    incomprehensible techy stuff
    I'm beginning to think this thread belongs in Geeks' Corner.

  14. #34
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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by Brian Doolan View Post
    I'm not even going to go into Low Copy Number DNA !!
    Heres an interesting article from the LA times on DNA evidence.


    The key quote here is about a "false match"..

    At Puckett's trial earlier this year, the prosecutor told the jury that the chance of such a coincidence was 1 in 1.1 million.

    Jurors were not told, however, the statistic that leading scientists consider the most significant: the probability that the database search had hit upon an innocent person.

    In Puckett's case, it was 1 in 3.
    So theres clearly a danger courts rely on science as solid evidence, rather than the circumstantial it generally is.

    Or to put it even more simply; "DNA "matches" by themselves can never definitively link someone to a crime."

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by David Franklin View Post
    My guess would be that a partial erase is actually slower than a full one; you've got a lot of stopping and starting, and you have to do a read-modify-write cycle for the 'tail' block of every file.
    You're right of course, but i meant as far as the users time and convenience is concerned - getting into the habit of secure erasing takes no time at all (you start it and get on with something else), and you can still use your computer.

    If in doubt - Thermite FTW

    There are also lots of places on the disk where data might be stored that won't be deleted by a simple partial erase; the swap partition in particular, and also any file that the OS is actively using at the time.
    Good points. In the main the windows TEMP directory will be a killer for your average crim that forgets about it, but if you are going to be sure you get everything you can find programs that will sort that out automatically too, and probably secure delete SWAP files. In the case of a SWAP partition, I suppose - you need a secure erase for that entire partition.

    Of course we are talking about ways to "cover your tracks" a stage that your normal non-techy criminal is not going to get to, and where you are some sort of master criminal your MO going forward is going to be to make sure that every bit of data you deal with is always secure from prying eyes. e.g. no magnetic media, encryption, hidden partitions, virtual machines etc.. so you are never fire fighting later on to cover your tracks.

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    I should also add of course that although we are talking about criminal recovery here, on a thread about blossoming police state its worth pointing out the legitimate covering of data tracks. If you are an activist in a police state , you will certainly want to make sure no one can recover your data.

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by David Bailey View Post
    Although, given that only 3% of crimes are solved via CCTV, despite us having about 5 million CCTV cameras in the UK, you have to wonder whether it's worth it.
    It seems to me that that isn't the most important statistic. That would be 'percentage of serious crimes solved by CCTV evidence' or even 'percentage of serious crimes in which no other evidence is available solved by CCTV evidence'.

    Plus, what about 'percentage of serious crimes in which CCTV evidence is a contributory factor'.

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    Heres an interesting article from the LA times on DNA evidence.
    Thanks for the link.

    I find it desperately sad that a judge can deny someone against whom the entire armoury of the state is being arraigned, the opportunity to use every bit of evidence he has to offset 'statistical' allegations being made against him.

    It would be like saying 'No, you can't have your alibi witnesses to challenge the eye-witness evidence against you, because it might confuse the jury.' No sh1t, Sherlock; that's the point. If the prosecution has the burden of proof but then the defendant is ham-strung in his response, might as well just lock up the suspects and save the costs of the trials.

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    I am thinking, bring in NCIS - they always solve the crime in 1 hour (45 mins if you cut the adverts)

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    Re: 1,008 hours

    Quote Originally Posted by Martin View Post
    I am thinking, bring in NCIS - they always solve the crime in 1 hour (45 mins if you cut the adverts)
    Well, the same is true of all the telly 'tecs (except Morse and Frost; they take - oo, about twice as long; Taggart as well (why do they still call it that when he died 15 years ago?).

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