Comments on: Gleick and the HP “Pretexting” Scandal

By: I nominate Dr. Peter Gleick for the first annual Walter Duranty award | Watts Up With That?

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:15:54 +0000

[...] Gleick and the HP “Pretexting” Scandal [...]

By: Dean Cardno

Dean Cardno — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:39:17 +0000

Well… just to dive WAY down into the weeds: Brandon is correct, that defragging will (likely) overwrite some of the no-longer used file fragments that remain after a file is “deleted” by the OS – the problem is that it will not *reliably* overwrite any of them, and will undoubtedly not overwrite *all* of them. As well, when writing a current data file over a ‘marked as unused’ space that contains a “deleted” file a defrag will only write a single pass. There is generally enough of a magnetic trace from the former file (ie, a bit that nominally reads “1″ may have ana ctual value coresponding to “0.85″ – implying that the overwritten file contained a “0″) that a specialist can recover it. By comparison, a disk cleaner (say PGP/GPG ‘shred’ function, or similar) will overwrite *all* of the ‘marked as unused’ space (with random values), and will do so a number of times, so that the residual magnetic traces are simply random values.

By: Brandon Shollenberger

Brandon Shollenberger — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:07:38 +0000

Keith Sketchley, it’s true defragmenting should* not lose data. However, there is a distinction between the “data” you refer to and “traces of… files.”

When a file is deleted, the hard drive doesn’t suddenly lose it. Instead, it marks the portion of the hard drive that file was on as available for use. The file stays there, like that, until the space is reused. But until that space is reused, the file is still there. The data is still available.

When you reformat a hard drive, it moves files around, and thus, it can place files “over top” of the deleted ones. This destroys traces of the data the file contained even though the file may have been deleted for months beforehand.

*For completion’s sake, defragmenting errors do occasionally happen and cause data to be corrupted.

By: Keith Sketchley

Keith Sketchley — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:02:28 +0000

After thinking a bit, and to be explicit, it is obvious to anyone who has checked into it and used “defragmenting” that it is supposed to NOT lose data, but only to put the chunks of a file all in one area of the drive.

(Normally the o/s grabs space where-ever it can, with some logic that may try to spread use of the surface to maximise life, as a file is made up of small chunks of space on the disc – even if in one area, it can become scattered. Including because the file may have been made larger, especially if superseded data is still in the file (which Word and WordPerfect used to default to in order to have “quick save” – IIRC later versions default to not (such as SP3 to Office 2003).

By: Keith Sketchley

Keith Sketchley — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:51:03 +0000

Thanks for the thorough work, Steve.

There should be broad laws of principle to cover fraudulent mis-representation (my term, I do not know laws, which do vary between fiefdoms, “pretext” seems milder but I presume comes from “false pretenses”).

I hope the average voter knows in their heart it is wrong.

PS: Amusing goof in the quote from Politico about David Kernell deleting computer records of his hacking of Sarah Palin’s email. I’m not expert enough to be absolutely sure, but I doubt “defragmented his hard disk” would erase traces of the files. I’d reformat, use a utility that repeatedly does something to the disk, or destroy the drive. (Yesterday by incinerating, today there is the someone less secure approach of shredding machines used for hard drives and portable devices.)

By: Tony Mach

Tony Mach — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 02:34:14 +0000

I am not a lawyer, but I think 502(c) does not apply. To me, this reads like a law against "classic hacking", where the target is a computer (e.g. hacking a password), and not when a computer is used ("pretexing" or social engineering) to trick a person, e.g. via email. Otherwise, pretty impressive list.

By: MikeN

MikeN — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:42:07 +0000

I don’t think that applies here. Gleick can say he has deleted an account, but all he really means is that he won’t be using that e-mail again. It’s like if I said I will be throwing away this cellphone, that doesn’t actually erase the records of the calls I’ve made.

By: Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:07:44 +0000

I agree that this is an important difference. In HP’s justification, their pretexting was done without malice, whereas Gleick’s was done with malice.

By: w.w.wygart

w.w.wygart — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:27:42 +0000

I think there is really one degree of difference between the HP spying scandal and the Gleick/Heartland affair. Hewlett Packard was investigating [spying] on its own people in order to catch someone inside their organization [George Keyworth or who ever it really was] who was damaging them. The more direct comparison of the two scandals would be, hypothetically, if Heartland then resorted to some type of subterfuge to get the goods on Gleick.

The techniques use and the subsequent legal ramifications may be analogous, but the ‘pretexts’ are one order of difference removed.

That’s my thinking,

W^3

By: neill

neill — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:30:12 +0000

The Greens’ wails about the Cimategate ‘hacker’ came fast and theick,
‘The emails were STOLEN — don’t you see, it’s a right-wing treick!’
Yet with the actual ill-gotten provenance of the Heartland docs revealed,
The Left’s strident proclamations of Heartland’s skull-duggery now well-concealed,
Snow-ball’s chance in Hell we’ll hear of this DOJ’s prosecution, let alone a single Leftist syllable, of “high-profile climate scientist” Dr. Peter Gleick.