Linux Forcibly Installed On Congressman's Computer In Act of Terrorism 343
fermion writes with news of Windows computers being forcefully liberated: "The campaign headquarters of Michael Grimm, a U.S. House of Representatives member from New York, were vandalized. What has not been reported everywhere is that Linux was installed on one of his computers, erasing data in the process. Is this a new attack on democracy by the open source radicals, or it is just a random occurrence?"
From the article: "'In fact, one officer said to me today they see this as a crime against the government, because I am a sitting United States congressman and they take it very seriously. You know, especially in light of what happened with Gabby Giffords, we're not in the world today where we can shrug things off,' Grimm said. ... [GNU/]Linux, an open-source operating system, was installed on Grimm's computers, erasing the hard drive contents, which included polling and voter identification data. But staff had backed up the hard drive contents hours beforehand. Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers."
congressman=ruling class? (Score:5, Insightful)
because I am a sitting United States congressman
Does anyone else get an air of elitism when people say things like this? "I work for the government, I'm better than you, and these things should only happen to you plebs." I feel that as long as our politicians think like this, we're doomed as a democracy.
Lack of perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
In light of a the attempted assassination of a congresswoman, throwing a lump of concrete through a window and flattening a computer definitely should be the highest priority for the police.
Re:Noob Hackers. (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd be amazed how clever some idiots are.
Re:There's more to this story. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's more to this story. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' is just so fucking difficult. Maybe it would have worked better to have the staffer throw rocks, and a young kid wipe the hard disk.
Re:congressman=ruling class? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like this guy?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/9563847/Police-log-reveals-details-of-Andrew-Mitchells-pleb-rant.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Once elected to office, the snout goes in the trough and they take all they can while thet rest of us pay for it.
Re:Sounds like data theft (Score:5, Insightful)
By the way, recovery of a data by this process has never even been attempted, let alone succeeded. There are images of HDD platter surfaces on the MFM Wikipedia page, but then again those aren't zero'd drives, and the current gen drives are approx 80x more densely packed.
Re:There's more to this story. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is, in part, about establishing a false equivalence. A Democratic Representative being shot in the face is just the same as a Republican Representative loosing a couple hours of computer uptime.
Re:Attack against Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There's more to this story. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having said that, I've never heard of it being done before either.
Re:There's more to this story. (Score:2, Insightful)
It was featured in the due diligence paranoia in Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", and rates right up there with using 4096 bit keys and the like. The question isn't whether or not you can ship the disk off to a data recovery company and remount the platter in a drive with an extra-sensitive head and recover the data, it is whether or not the NSA could recover the data with an unlimited budget and state of the art equipment, including new equipment custom engineered for the purpose as needed.
If your "crime" is covering up a bit of petty embezzlement (as postulated presumably humorously above), nobody will spend that kind of money or time on it and overwriting with zeros would probably suffice. If your "crime" was the hijacking of a nuclear submarine armed with a small stack of nuclear-tipped freely targetable tomahawks (and there was some chance that your recovered laptop had once contained a Google Maps entry for your secret underwater base) I would not assume that a simple overwrite of zeros in particular was enough to completely destroy all hysteretic trace of each bit's previous state, to the point where previous 1s were solidly within the statistical noise compared to previous 0s. And don't forget -- there could be other traces or tests that might be used to recover the former state besides a superconducting read head -- laser reflection, physically slicing the tracks and taking a spiral microphotograph of the actual magnetic material that once held the bits. If price was no object, the question would very much be "Is the data on the disk degraded beyond recovery from an information theoretic and physical point of view?"
The government, at least, takes this possibility seriously, as do large corporations with secrets. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure, where the list of government standards for data erasure include (as I noted in the original reply) overwriting of the data multiple times with random information, and where the smart money takes the entire disk including the firmware and controllers and chassis and melts it down to a puddle of slag at the end of the day no matter what methods are used outside of that.
Sincerely Yours in conspiracy-theory paranoia,
rgb
P.S. -- Now it's time to return to my doomsday bunker and check up on the supply of fresh water and tinfoil for caps...;-)
PPS -- Sorry about the AC reply; my browser/slashdot seems to have disconnected my login. Zounds, it must be the NSA, trying to discredit my comment so they can continue to read the poorly erased data of Islamic terrorists and stupid embezzlers! Sancho! My armor!
Re:Attack against Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)