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Comment by idibidiart | Hacker News Reader

Data Recovery tools can still get the data, no?

Can anyone comment on viability of recovering a multiple degaussing?

> The new e-mails, which were sent by the Coalition for Good Governance to Ars, show that Chris Dehner, one of the Information Security staffers, e-mailed his boss, Stephen Gay, to say that the two backup servers had been "degaussed three times."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/days-after-activ...

I think the email itself is evidence of crime. Why bother with recovering the data when the absence of it allows the prosecution to portray the worst imaginable criminal scenario. They actually shot themselves in the foot because no matter how bad their crime is it cannot be as bad as erasing the data and degaussing 3 times. The prosecution can claim the absolute worst has happened. And they have no way to prove them wrong. And a murder weapon (the email)

Prosecution cannot claim anything without evidence. Now there’s only evidence of obstruction of justice by some IT manager, but no evidence to support charges of election fraud by executive branch of government.

There should be laws that give the benefit of the doubt to the prosecution/litigant in situations like this. Not holding my breath though.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to the prosecutor goes against the “innocent until proven guily” ideology. You’re basically saying, “he unknowingly deleted evidence he didn’t know was evidence. That proves it’s a conspiracy because we now don’t have evidence to prove our case”

It’s the reason cops are seen as immune to the law; The courts give them the benefit of the doubt a lot.

Degaussing 3 times is not evidence of knowingly deleting evidence. I find that laughable.

It's clearly evidence of knowingly deleting data. It may not be evidence of knowingly deleting evidence. The distinction matters, because deleting data is not a crime.

Degaussing 3 times. Who does that when deleting data? Unless they don't want investigators to find the data? And isn't the data in this case a public record? Why delete a public record indelibly unless they had manipulated that record and wanted to hide the fact..?

> Degaussing 3 times. Who does that when deleting data?

The same kind of people who think they need 35 passes to wipe their hard drive.

Not if they were careful enough to overwrite the free disk space with more data.

But then that would incriminate them even more! right? because it's not just "We erased it to make room for new data" ... This is in the realm of obstruction of justice.

They could claim the wipe was to protect voter privacy though, in which case one would expect them to make the data unrecoverable.

"They could claim the wipe was to protect voter privacy though, in which case one would expect them to make the data unrecoverable."

Not after a lawsuit is filed. That's obstruction of justice regardless of what they claim. No?

Yes and no. If the "standard procedure" when they normally wipe the data as part of routine is to overwrite (Which I'd probably hope so) then the fact that they did so a) Makes it impossible to recover, and b) Doesn't make the action any more incriminating.

This is entirely separate from questions of obstruction of justice.

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