Being charged with rootballs and stalks

[SOTF420]

Am I the only one who keeps a 5 gallon bucket of water next to my laptop?

I would say if you are in a med state and slightly over your numbers they are not gonna bother your computer. I for one would sure as hell never run big plants numbers, people who grow over 100 plants really must like to gamble. Just not worth the potential disaster so grow fewer and bigger plants.

 

[40AmpstoFreedom]

So you're certain your ISP will be involved with your bust?

All major Finanacial Institutions, ISPS, phone providers, facebook, myspace, google, hotmail, et cetera have entire divisions of their company dedicated to selling information requested by the feds.

It is a whole business in itself...

It's just like all the gps in people's cars, phones, showing everywhere you've been upon request...

Technology is a terribly wonderful thing it seems.

 

[40AmpstoFreedom]

Am I the only one who keeps a 5 gallon bucket of water next to my laptop?

I would say if you are in a med state and slightly over your numbers they are not gonna bother your computer. I for one would sure as hell never run big plants numbers, people who grow over 100 plants really must like to gamble. Just not worth the potential disaster so grow fewer and bigger plants.

That will not break your hard drive sorry man. You have to absolutely pierce, crush, destroy, due to what it is composed of.

 

[designer]

I haved heard that you can burn your computer up in a hot fire and the FBI can still go dig out the hardrive, put the disk it'self into a functioning hardrive player and undelete anything and everything that you have ever deleted. Then use that information any way they please.

 

[johnnyla]

the only way to do it is to overwrite the drive with zeros 7 times and then drill holes in it with a drill. then, if you wan't to have a water dunking ceremony for good measure, why not, but overwriteing with zeros 7 times and then drilling about 30 holes through the physical drive should make any harddrive unreadable by anyone.

water dunking won't do shit but piss them off and think you have something worth hiding, in which case, they are definately going to take out the spinning disc out of your wet drive and dry it off, copy it, and then go through the contents.

what do you guys have on your comps that is so sketchy anways?

too bad you would never have the time to overwrite a drive 7 times and drill 30 holes in the HD if the cops knocked on your door. You also probably shouldn't do that if it's illegal.

 

[Mountain]

what do you guys have on your comps that is so sketchy anways?

I've been thinking the same thing?

 

[SOTF420]

Pictures of the plants they found anyways?

ha

 

[40AmpstoFreedom]

A shit ton of leverage for the prosecutor heh /shrug

 

[Stress_test]

Bro, nothing on you Comp is "Temp"-- If they are doing forensics on a comp, they will pull up most everything you have typed, and places you go...including deleted files/pics--
These things are straight Evidence Farms--

Actually that isn't completely true.
Read on and I will qualify this statement shortly.

btw, you will be asked in court to provide the keys for the encryption you use. its the same as LEO opening safes.

In court cases they will either have the info or not. They aren't going to get away with asking the court to order you to divulge information which might not even be there. Before the judge will give such an order the prosecutor will have to prove that the encrypted file contains evidence that directly applies to the charges levied against the defendant.
In other words they can't ask for evidence that they can't already prove exists.

They can see everything you can and more (things you've deleted, things your hard drive has written over.) But if you cover your tracks, leo would have to analyze your drive(s) to see data that no longer has an hd addy listed in the operating system software. They can do it but you'd have to be somebody they're looking for or worth the trouble.

Partly true bro. Over the years there has been a lot of myth, magic and mirrors evolve that casts a layer of smoke over forensic data recovery.

All major Finanacial Institutions, ISPS, phone providers, facebook, myspace, google, hotmail, et cetera have entire divisions of their company dedicated to selling information requested by the feds.

It's just like all the gps in people's cars, phones, showing everywhere you've been upon request...

Not at all. For over 12 years I owned the largest independent internet service on the west coast. In that time I recieved probably 1 request per month from LEO, DEA and other agencies asking for user logs. Of those I can only remember 3 that subpoenas, 1 of which was regarding the torture and murder of a well know mail order bride in Mercer Is. WA. (Remember Anastasia?)

My company was also subpoenaed to do the data recovery from his pc's.

I haved heard that you can burn your computer up in a hot fire and the FBI can still go dig out the hardrive, put the disk it'self into a functioning hardrive player and undelete anything and everything that you have ever deleted. Then use that information any way they please.

Complete hype. On occasion data can be recovered from fire damaged hdds, but it is rare. Platters are typically made using an aluminium or glass and ceramic substrate. In manufacturing, a thin coating is deposited on both sides of the substrate. The coating has a layered structure consisting of various metallic (mostly non-magnetic) alloys as under layers. A magnetic metallic (usually a cobalt alloy) layer is deposited last for data storage. The magnetic surface of each platter is divided into small sub-micrometer-sized magnetic regions, each of which is used to represent a single binary unit of information. A typical magnetic region on a hard-disk platter is about 200–250 nanometers wide (in the radial direction of the platter) and extends about 25–30 nanometers in the down-track direction (the circumferential direction on the platter), corresponding to about 100 billion bits (100 gigabits) per square inch of disk area.

When exposed to heat the layers begin to oxidize blister and separate causing craters and blisters over the data area.
This happens at much lower temperatures than one might think.
With that in mind, and one considers that data is deposited in tiny segments onto the drive, (not in a continuous uninterupted stream like a record player) and is broken between cylinders, sectors, and heads when being written to hdd. So part of a picture might be stored in 1 sector of 1 cylinder but the rest may be scattered over 20 or more physical locations on the drive.

Consider it like stacking 4 or 5 music albums and then exposing them to excessive heat, then grind them all into pieces the size of rice. You might find pieces that contain 1 or 2 words, but nobody would ever be able to reconstruct the music.
You would have a better chance of listening to those albums than recovering data from a burned hdd.

the only way to do it is to overwrite the drive with zeros 7 times and then drill holes in it with a drill..............

too bad you would never have the time to overwrite a drive 7 times and drill 30 holes in the HD if the cops knocked on your door. You also probably shouldn't do that if it's illegal.

The command line (or preprogrammed shortcut to the application) WDClear -t3 will do a forensic wipe of a drive in about as much time as it takes to type it.

It is foolproof and 100+%... WDClear was a program written originally by Western Digital to test, diagnose, erase, recover, partition, and format hdds. Around 1999 or 2000 it mysteriously disappeared from the industry after it was used in LA to destroy evidence being held in lockup. But is still available for download from ftp and some torrent sites. The command switches may be more difficult to locate since over time they have been stripped from the app in order for smaller file size.

"IF" you were to attempt destroying your data "after" LEO arrives, you better make damn sure they don't recover a tiny fragment or you will most likely do time for tampering with, destroying, damaging evidence. And they will make it stick every time.

Now there is a lot of talk about internet security. I am here to tell you as a professional in the IT industry that there is no such thing. No place on the internet or any computer is secure, although some server security apps are less insecure than others.

There has never been an encryption that is 100% and there has never been one that couldn't be cracked in a reasonable period of time.
Trust me: The DEA has lots of time if they think it will improve their case.

Now I am responding to the comments and NOT the people who made them so that (hopefully) nobody is offended and I don't start a flame war.

Forensic data recovery requires 96% to be admissable as evidence. If 5% of a file is corrupted beyond recovery the entire file is subject to question and therefore is contaminated evidence.

Not only that: But simply deleting and defragging your hdd will damage the deleted file enough that LEO won't even mess with attempting recovery. The feds might but if the machine is used daily and temp files deleted daily there is a high likelihood that deleted data is being overwritten on a daily basis.

 

[TruthOrLie]

They got a computer now that can do the work equal to if every person on the planet was using 3 computers at the same time.

After you die they take all your web contributions and hard drive data and pictures and they create a "new you" in a far off country or state.

This "new you" is used to pretend to exist long after you're dead.

Beware.

 

[Duplicate]

There has never been an encryption that is 100% and there has never been one that couldn't be cracked in a reasonable period of time.
Trust me: The DEA has lots of time if they think it will improve their case.

Even PGP? I realize that no encryption is 100% but you think they could do PGP in a reasonable amount of time without any keys?

 

[Mountain]

A shit ton of leverage for the prosecutor heh /shrug

Depends what's on your puter regarding how much leverage. I mean are peeps recording transactions in Quickbooks or something? They'll probably take better pictures of your plants than you might have on your puter. In most every situation I know of directly never saw anything anybody had on their puter cause them problems. The leverage is the hard evidence. They throw everything they can at first and a lot of window dressing.

If they're breaking down your door then much more to worry about than your puter and doubt anyone will react fast enough in their shock to dispose of any incriminating puter evidence. Only thing would be something like a flash drive where everything is and you only have that in your puter when active on it. They took my med farm friend's puter with all his pics of his huge plants, info on the forum accounts he had, etc., and all that and never showed up even in their discovery info.

His bigger problem was the unrooted cuttings he yanked the day before, which they re-planted and took pics of, and the various piles of dead, crispy, whole plants. The pile of hash he had never was a problem really nor was the scale. In the end there was very little left that they actually squeezed him with. It was his laziness in cleaning up that was part of the problem. Keep your house like someone will walk in at any moment.

 

[David762]

Depends -- pre- or post-commercial & key length.

Depends -- pre- or post-commercial & key length.

Even PGP? I realize that no encryption is 100% but you think they could do PGP in a reasonable amount of time without any keys?

When the PGP source code was open source, and still under the purview of it's author Phil Zimmerman, it was reasonably secure. But after Zimmerman commercialized his product, and then sold his company, all bets regarding the quality of the security of PGP is under question.

The USA Federal government has corrupted EVERY Operating System and Encryption method that they have gotten their hands on -- if not backdoors & key escrow, it's vulnerable implementation of sound encryption methodology. Remember the Clinton regime's "Clipper Chip"? Or the $Billions the Feds spent on MS OSes & Applications? Or the serious problems that Apple's Steve Jobs got into with the IRS? The Feds use a variety of methods to their sole benefit.

Bear in mind that when your laptop is confiscated when entering or leaving the USA, it goes to a technical tiger team that uses a cluster of Sony PS3s running Linux to crack your encrypted files -- more powerful than a supercomputer of 10+ years ago.

IIRC, the last open source version of PGP to be available outside the USA (in printed book form, no less, to avoid ITAR regulations) was 2.6.1i (or some such). With a 2048 bit key, it was estimated that the encryption was unbreakable -- but that was 10+ years ago. Today, I wouldn't use PGP (open source version) with less that 4096 bit encryption.

RSA is no longer patented -- I would use that with 4096 bit. AES256 is pretty good, depending upon implementation -- again, use 4096 bit encryption. Other products, like TruCrypt, may or may not be secure. TruCrypt has the advantage of being a separate and encrypted filesystem on your computer -- it must be decrypted to be mounted as a drive. The best security policy is to not have incriminating data on your laptop whatsoever -- an easily disposed of USB Thumb Drive would be better, especially since they are sensitive to heat damage.

YMMV

 

[Mountain]

The best security policy is to not have incriminating data on your laptop whatsoever -- an easily disposed of USB Thumb Drive would be better, especially since they are sensitive to heat damage.

These days I don't know why peeps would use modern electronic devices to record incriminating evidence. If they confiscate my puter or phone it gives me an excuse to upgrade...lol.

Going back to the thumb drive cause I'm not a puter geek...can you use something like that to boot from and operate through so that all history is there and nothing on your hard drive or maybe when you want to delve into your nefarious lifestyle use the thumb drive for that work?

 

[David762]

Ahh ... use the Force, Luke. Use the Force ...

Ahh ... use the Force, Luke. Use the Force ...

the only way to do it is to overwrite the drive with zeros 7 times and then drill holes in it with a drill. then, if you wan't to have a water dunking ceremony for good measure, why not, but overwriteing with zeros 7 times and then drilling about 30 holes through the physical drive should make any harddrive unreadable by anyone.

water dunking won't do shit but piss them off and think you have something worth hiding, in which case, they are definately going to take out the spinning disc out of your wet drive and dry it off, copy it, and then go through the contents.

what do you guys have on your comps that is so sketchy anways?

too bad you would never have the time to overwrite a drive 7 times and drill 30 holes in the HD if the cops knocked on your door. You also probably shouldn't do that if it's illegal.

Ahh ... use the Force, Luke. Use the Force ... like a well-placed thermite or thermate charge inside your computer, wired to the OEM On|Off switch which has been replaced by a new covert On|Off switch.

Better still, don't put anything incriminating on your computer to begin with -- use a software product like TruCrypt in conjunction with a USB Thumb Drive -- easy to remove; easy to hide; easy to destroy (they're sensitive to heat).

 

[Duplicate]

These days I don't know why peeps would use modern electronic devices to record incriminating evidence. If they confiscate my puter or phone it gives me an excuse to upgrade...lol.

Going back to the thumb drive cause I'm not a puter geek...can you use something like that to boot from and operate through so that all history is there and nothing on your hard drive or maybe when you want to delve into your nefarious lifestyle use the thumb drive for that work?

http://portableapps.com/about/what_is_a_portable_app

 

[kmk420kali]

You can delete hard drive addresses that would force leo to analyze your drive. Or you can just leave your hard drive full of addresses that appear on a monitor and open at the click of a mouse.

Contrary to popular opinion, leo doesn't analyze every computer drive they run across in a pot bust. Analyzation takes time, money and manpower. A mouse click, not so much.

I'll put it this way. If you were searched, wouldn't you like to have whatever contraband you own to be hidden, out of plain view and without a sign that says, "look right here"...

hmmmm...maybe that is why I started off with, "If they are doing forensics on a comp,"...

bro?

Just because someone calls you bro, doesn't mean you need to pull down your pants and bend over...

 

[David762]

Most modern Operating Systems (PC & Mac) ...

Most modern Operating Systems (PC & Mac) ...

These days I don't know why peeps would use modern electronic devices to record incriminating evidence. If they confiscate my puter or phone it gives me an excuse to upgrade...lol.

Going back to the thumb drive cause I'm not a puter geek...can you use something like that to boot from and operate through so that all history is there and nothing on your hard drive or maybe when you want to delve into your nefarious lifestyle use the thumb drive for that work?

Most modern Operating Systems (PC & Mac) ... allow the use of multiple User log-ins. If a software product like TruCrypt is installed on the computer hard drive and available to each User, one User's entire Home Directory could be stored on a removable storage device such as a USB Thumb Drive. Part of your Log-In procedure would be to insert your encrypted Thumb Drive and enter your TruCrypt pass-phrase -- no Thumb Drive, or without the correct pass-phrase, there is no User Home Directory. Of course, the OS will cache any mounted filesystem to memory|free disk when used, but AFAIK every OS has the ability to script a secure erase of unused disk space upon Power-Down.

Reading of USB Thumb Drives are reasonably fast, while encrypting and writing data back onto the Thumb Drive is 10x to 20x slower -- that inconvenience is a relatively small price to pay for data security. For innocuous things like on-line gaming, just run it from the Hard Disk under a different User account with the Home Directory on the Hard Drive.

 

[Mountain]

If a software product like TruCrypt is installed on the computer hard drive

I guess if they get that far and find that on your puter they'll have some serious questions like...OK where is it? LOL! That's when a thick skin helps. If they're asking they don't know and don't have the goods on you...time to smile in response

Thx for the info...helpful!

 

[Stress_test]

Even PGP? I realize that no encryption is 100% but you think they could do PGP in a reasonable amount of time without any keys?

Hey Duplicate, I have had to smoke a bowl and think about your questions since my memory is so screwed up sometimes. (And this is a stretch, I had to go back through some old files and shit to find some of the info. I have double checked and aside for names and maybe dates, this information is FACT.)

Anyway what I can remember about PGP is that the original RSA public key cryptosystem was developed at MIT. Shortly before the details were due to be published, some gentlemen in suits from a US government department reportedly "asked" them to cancel publication.
However, copies of the article had already reached the outside world; A.K. Dewdney of Scientific American had a photocopy of the document explaining the algorithm. People began photocopying and distributing the document. It was a huge issue in the IT industry because it was really the first time the feds got involved in computer software development, but more importantly; stopping it.

But as it soon became public:The RSA algorithm had been developed with Federal funding from grants from the National Science Foundation and the Navy. It was patented by MIT (U.S. patent #4,405,829, issued 20th September 1983).You can check that patent registration number, I have a copy of it and it is authentic.

The patent was then handed over to a commercial company in California called Public Key Partners (PKP). PKP holds the exclusive commercial license to sell and sub-license the RSA public key cryptosystem. (I still have their original releases AND the source code that was released to developers.) They also hold other patents which cover other public key cryptography algorithms. This gives them absolute control over who may legally use public key cryptography in the US and Canada.



It is important to note that the RSA patents are not valid outside the USA and Canada, because the patent was not applied for until after publication and the program, source codes and that publication that explained the cryptography algorithms in detail had already been spread around the world via underground ftp servers and IRC. Remember? At that time the internet was really still in it's infancy, we used linux and dos type "get" commands to download files. LOL The good ole days of the black chat-boxes...


Also note that none of PKP's patents have been tested in court. They might be ruled invalid in a real court case. PKP has been reluctant to take people to court, although they did threaten Phil Zimmerman, the author of PGP, with legal action. So far, there has been a lot of sabre-rattling, but no real action.


PKP has also been seemingly reluctant to produce any products or license their patents. Eventually, after PGP 1.0 was released, PKP released their own RSA code. Called RSAREF, it licensed for test applications only, not for real use. They repeatedly refused to license RSA for use in PGP, until MIT (the original patent holders, remember) forced them to license MIT PGP 2.6.


The IDEA algorithm used in PGP is also patented, by Ascom-Tech AG of Zurich. However, Ascom-Tech allow free use of the IDEA algorithm in freeware and shareware products.
A US company, ViaCrypt, has side-stepped this legal issue. They had already licensed the RSA algorithm from PKP, and it was clear that the license applied to PGP, given a suitable implementation of RSA. ViaCrypt have therefore been able to start selling an entirely legal, 100% legitimate version of PGP, with all patents properly licensed.


Okay now before you all get bored or need to go hit the pipe I will elaborate for those of you who haven't alreday caught on: The original cryptography algorithms were funded by the US Government and then the gov. attempted to squelch the development, and then, the gov. attempted to stop the release of the detailed cryptography algorithms.
Now most of the rest doesn't need any further qualifications because the only time anybody has ever been taken to legal action was when Zimmerman got a hold of a copy of the original source code and the cryptography algorithms and released it under his own name. And nothing ever developed from that really either.

I personally believe that the entire cryptography algorithms concept was corrupted upon conception because it was a US Government project all the way through.
Furthermore, I believe that PGP and all of the cryptography algorithms that are derived from the original source code (all of them) are more likely to be watched by the gov. because they know that the data being encrypted is data that people don't want other people to access. And the Government paid to create it AND holds a master key to the cryptography algorithms.
What better way to lure the sheep to the wolves party?

Sorry this was so long winded but I could go on for hours about the things I do remember. I guess that's because I tend to forget so much?