Dutch Gov't Has No Idea How To Delete Tapped Calls 186
McDutchie writes "The law in the Netherlands says that intercepted phone calls between attorneys and their clients must be destroyed. But the Dutch government has been keeping under wraps for years that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them (Google translation). Now, an email (PDF) from the National Police Services Agency (KLPD) has surfaced, revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret. The Dutch police are now trying to get their Israeli supplier Verint to tell them how to delete tapped calls and comply with the law. Meanwhile, attorneys in the Netherlands remain afraid to use their phones."
You can't make this stuff up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely superb.
It's called a Dutch Delete. It helps deleting the case by messing up the evidence.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Dutch courage eh? /me hands the Dutch legal fraternity a nice, cold glass of encryption.
Seriously, why don't we all just move to encrypted SIP clients? It's not like there aren't a pile of open source ones out there.Yes, it'll never be mass market, but it's now easy enough for anyone clued up enough to know that they need to be using it.
Failing that, there's always encrypted email. Thunderbird + Enigmail is a no-brainer.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, why don't we all just move to encrypted SIP clients? It's not like there aren't a pile of open source ones out there.Yes, it'll never be mass market, but it's now easy enough for anyone clued up enough to know that they need to be using it.
But then how would big brother monitor our phone calls to protect us from ourselves???
Re:You can't make this stuff up (Score:5, Funny)
I thought a Dutch Delete only applied to torrents?
No no! The Dutch Police used to share all phone taps via torrents, and now they don't know how to delete those. That's the real reason why The Pirate Bay should be shut down.
Re: (Score:2)
And in related news...
"The law in America says that file sharing hosts and their clients/files must be destroyed. But [what] the Dutch ISP Nforce has been keeping under wraps for years [is] that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them"
So many levels....
not afraid (Score:5, Interesting)
Lawyers aren't afraid at all to use the phone: If a tapped conversation between them and their client turns up later in court, their client usually walks.
Re:not afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're only looking at the simple case. What about: I find out the intimate details of what you and your client were talking about on the phone and then use those details to dig deeper and find evidence I never would have without that phone call? Then I turn up in court, destroy your case, have nothing but hard evidence and you have no way of knowing that I used your taped conversation to do so (and probably couldn't prove it even if you thought that).
It'd be immoral and illegal but it *would* destroy your case outright and the chances of me getting caught are probably quite low if I'm someone with intelligence and knowledge of legal workings like, say, another lawyer?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It'd be immoral and illegal
Is it really immoral if you're trying to pin someone down for harm done to society? (The potential for abuse is high which is why it's illegal, but illegal doesn't automatically mean immoral.)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Knowing that the prosecution might be listening, the defendant will be afraid to speak frankly to his lawyer. This will result in inadequate defense and consequently to the conviction of innocent people.
Re: (Score:2)
You may not have been paying attention, but your mother probbly answered your question when you were a child and she said "two wrongs don't make a right".
Re: (Score:2)
It'd be immoral and illegal
Is it really immoral if you're trying to pin someone down for harm done to society? (The potential for abuse is high which is why it's illegal, but illegal doesn't automatically mean immoral.)
Yes. The rules are in place to ensure an adequate defense. The whole idea that the ends justify the means is corrosive to a free society.
Re: (Score:2)
Immoral? You must be a lawyer. Destroying the defense against a case of a guilty man is not immoral, letting him walk because a law designed to protect the innocent is.
Of course, throwing an innocent man in jail because someone overheard something that misleads others into thinking he's guilty is immoral too.
It can go both ways, but don't paint it as one cut and dried picture. You may think its okay to let someone walk on a technicality or lack of evidence in order to protect the innocent, I however thin
Re: (Score:2)
Loopholes in the system? Illegally monitoring someones private conversations is not a "Loophole", it is a crime . A loophole is when a search warrant was issued, but no one noticed that the court clerk typed the wrong address making it invalid.
The word Immoral may be a tiny bit strong, but this much is true: Any police officer or prosecutor who knowingly uses illegaly obtained evidence in their case against a subject should be fired. Not only do they risk convicting the wrong person (Just because some evide
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The police wouldn't be dumb enough to use that as evidence.
What they are more concerned about is the police hearing "Oh, you did do it? Right, this is how we'll get you off..."
Once they know you did it, even if they can't use that recording, you can bet your bottom dollar they will put every resource to use in finding the proof you did it, where without that taped call they may see no surface evidence and move on to the next suspect.
Lawyer client privilege (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Since most of mainland Europe uses the Napoleonic legal system then yes, it is.
Apart from summing up[1], lawyers[2] ask questions which by definition are neither true nor false. It's witnesses who answer them, under oath.
[1] And from what I've seen, they always talk in a strange indirect manner - "we have shown that...", "if foo then you must acquit", "witness X's testimony is unreliable" etc. They
Re: (Score:2)
You must be French, or from Louisiana.
The official definition of the mainstream European legal system is either "Roman Law" or "Romano-Germanic". As the WTO describes it,
I would remind you that the Netherlands has signed up to the Treaty o
Re: (Score:2)
It might not be "official", but I think the mainstream European system of law is usually referred to as "civil law".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
What then do you call Law Society members? (Score:4, Interesting)
However, your post is utterly uninformed. Solicitors advise clients on law in lower courts. In higher courts barristers will more usually do the work. Commercial clients who don't like solicitor's advice will frequently try to get advice from a QC - a senior barrister - in the hope it will persuade their boss to go on with the case, hence my father's oft-repeated comment to clients "You can have counsel's opinion and it'll cost you £30000, or you can slip me £15000 and I'll tell you that it's 50-50 for half as much."
Re: (Score:2)
Ha! You obviously don't know about the utter cluelesness of the Dutch authorities. In actuality, these phone calls have found their way to court in numerous occasions, even to the point that a 3 year investigation of the Hell's Angels was thrown out of court as their evidence consisted of the perps talking to their lawyers.
You see, in the Netherlands the police is stupid, and the prosecuters are worse. The only reason anybody gets locked up at
Re: (Score:2)
The real problem is if the client tells his lawyer he DIDN'T do it (the police/prosecutor will never believe that) and then tells him about something he withheld from police because it would look really damning.
Then investigators can work backwards from the fact to some plausible way they could have stumbled onto it.
Re:not afraid (Score:4, Insightful)
That may be true, but if the police / the prosecution is smart, they don't use the tapped calls themselves as evidence, but simply use them during their own investigation, and to better prepare their rebuttal to the defense attorney's arguments.
Regardless of lawyers' feelings, this is a major violation of a basic right to have a private conversation with your defense attorney. The fact that these calls are tapped at all is outrageous. If those calls were occasionally accidentally stored that would be even more outrageous. But if they are not only recorded but even impossible to delete, ... well I can't think of a word.
Re:not afraid (Score:4, Informative)
The conversation between lawyer and client may be confidential, but the extent of the protective perimeter you set up around it is a practical matter.
You may declare prison and law office phones sacred altogether in order to make sure you don't record such conversations, missing a lot of useful conversations, but if you don't, you will have to listen to the conversations to establish, firstly, that it is a confidential conversation, and secondly, that the recording doesn't contain parts you presumably may use (for instance the lawyer dictating something to a secretary in the background).
Dutch practice is that you may not use or store it in principle but you may listen to the recording and store it until you did. After that, you have to destroy it, and the suspicion is now that the system only deletes it.
Having said that, this whole thing became an issue after it was discovered confidential phone conversations were actually copied to DVD by the police in one high profile case, which is indeed outrageous.
Re: (Score:2)
We only have to look at the number of officially recorded wiretaps per capita to see that Dutch (and for instance Italian, Swiss) authorities are indeed two factors of ten more likely to wiretap than US authorities. Monitoring in real time would be too labour intensive for Dutch police purposes.
The wiretaps are in reality hardly relevant for evidence purposes. The police uses them mostly tactically for surveillance of, and investigation into the structure of, criminal organizations. It's a more efficient us
Re: (Score:2)
``That may be true, but if the police / the prosecution is smart, they don't use the tapped calls themselves as evidence, but simply use them during their own investigation, and to better prepare their rebuttal to the defense attorney's arguments.''
Heh. The whole reason they are actually finally looking into this is that many defendants are acquitted because of mistakes made by the prosecution - in this case, not deleting recordings. I hope this shakes things up so that other data retention issues are looke
Re: (Score:2)
It's not as simple as that.
The phone call is never going to appear in court. What could happen is that the police listen to the call and then have a better idea where to look to find evidence that will help them with their case. This evidence will be presented to court, will be solid evidence that proves the accused guilt, and there is no way you could prove it was obtained as a result of tapping a privilidged phone call.
Re: (Score:2)
Easy (Score:3, Funny)
You might want to wear safety goggles.
Re: (Score:2)
Make sure to grind the aluminum oxide and iron filings very very finely, this is a mistake that beginners often make and then it doesn't work. I personally recommend a fine file, but this will be SLOW.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The best place to set fire to your mixture is in the basement of your houses of parliament [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just put an average user at the console ... (Score:5, Funny)
... and tell them that there's no way they could ever delete anything. Trust me, they'll find a way.
So many telcos (Score:4, Informative)
Fox new did a report on it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kle7ZgmFcpQ [youtube.com] (pt 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeaXlrldqwo [youtube.com] (pt 2)
Why or how so many national telcos let interception drift away from core in house responsibilities is just strange.
If your an attorney and your client is literate, buy a note pad, write out your work, read and then destroy (with a few pages under the written page too).
With fusion centres in the US and any suspect now a "terrorist" most of the attorney client privilege protection is getting blurred.
Conspiracy theory (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a well-known conspiracy theory: that Mossad has created Telco front companies throughout the world to spy on other nations. See The Israeli Spy Ring [whatreallyhappened.com], which talks about the Fox News articles, and another typical story [counterpunch.org]. Of course, a conspiracy theory doesn't make it true...
Re: (Score:2)
>>...revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret
Apparently, there IS an app for that.
>>With fusion centres in the US and any suspect now a "terrorist" most of the attorney client privilege protection is getting blurred.
Well, I certainly hope they keep those terrorists away from the fusion centres!!
Re: (Score:2)
Sort of like NSA meets army meets FBI meets NYPD meets you and your lawyer.
Under section 802 its "any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law" and the full force of the the US gov starts to warm up around you and your lawyer
Re: (Score:2)
Whoosh. Fusion Center:
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/intro/info.html [mit.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Last time I worked on it, Verint only made the front-end software. That is, the software that you entered the warrant and details on. It then passed the tap information on to the actual telecom system, which in the case I was dealing with was developed by Chinese and Indian programmers.
Telecom software is usually run by code from companies like Ericson, Siemens, Nortel, Motorola or Alcatel-Lucent. The Verint stuff is just the GUI and passes the instructions on to the actual system that does the work. Ca
Re: (Score:2)
You can have all the local "heavily restricted" you want.
If the entered data is going around the world, whats at the other end?
Who wrote the back end or hardware side is fixed and set in place.
The tap information shows who your interested in, why and who else might be connected.
Its show the officer/s and department and type of tap.
One person, one state or roving, friends too?
T
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the entered data isn't going around the world. The data entry consoles are restricted as well, though nowhere near as tightly as the actual hardware. The data is usually entered by a law enforcement officer on a terminal in their station. Connections for everything are IPSec tunnels, so no snooping.
Still, it would be about as secure as the criminal record check or license plate check computers. That is to say, only officers, friends, friends of friends, connected PIs and lawyers, family, friends o
any slashdot reader surprised? (Score:2, Informative)
And I am not sure if they are interested in having tapped calls deleted
I mean really deleted!
Re: (Score:2)
Most of that is done by Nice recording company, based in Israel (they sell the machines; they don't do the actual recording themselves.)
Every air traffic controller in the WORLD is recorded on Nice machines. They are HUGE.
So, yeah, Israelis know a thing or two about recording a phone call.
If they can't delete them.... (Score:2)
....the system is probably a piece of shit built by incompetents. What are the odds they can even find them after 3 years?
On the other hand perhaps they can delete them but they're claiming not to be able to so they can hang onto them.
Either way police that don't comply with the law, or incompetent fools - not good.
Re: (Score:2)
(yeah, yeah. I know. I'm joking).
No joke, it's hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Deleting data is really really hard. If one is storing large amounts of data it is difficult to put a system in place which can prove that every copy in your posession has been deleted. Think about the work of sifting through thousands of write-once offline backups, be it tapes or CDs or whatever, locating the data, copying the original minus the data and destroying the originals. If that's not hard enough, what about data that's not in discrete files. Say there's a PostgreSQL database that's zipped and spans a thousand peices of physical media. The only way to delete a record is to load the whole database then redump it. And don't forget about regenerating all the index files. And dealing with obsolete file formats.
This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.
Re:No joke, it's hard (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No joke, it's hard (Score:4, Informative)
I think what it is easy to forget as geeks is just how hard everything works to keep data. All our technology is designed around the assumption that you never want to lose any data. Thus completely removing it gets harder all the time.
As another example snapshot backups are now real common. NetApps can be configured, and often are, to take periodic snapshots of your data. That way, if something is accidentally deleted or modified, there are point in time shots to go back to. Likewise Windows Vista and 7 now keep revisions of files automatically. If you change a file, a new version is written and the old one is kept, by default, so long as there's free space on the drive.
Now none of this is stuff you can't turn off or remove but it is all stuff that adds to the complexity. Just deleting the file, and even overwriting it, doesn't necessarily do it. The computer may still have a copy. It is designed such to try and keep you from losing your data accidentally.
None of this is to excuse the government, if they have a requirement to delete these things they need to work out a way to do so, however that doesn't mean I don't sympathize with the problem. It isn't trivial to ensure all copies have been delete and have been done so in a provable fashion.
This is why when we surplus old computers, the harddrives never go with. They are taken to be wiped and/or destroyed later. We are just not interested in screwing around with making sure the data is gone and then screwing that up. Instead a simple visual inspection tells you there is no data (since there are no drives).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Zuh? Why in the world would you go to the effort of copying all files from a tape drive except what you want deleted to somewhere else, and then destroy the physical tape the 'to be deleted' file is on?
I mean, I'm not a programmer by profession (although I have dabbled in it for years), but I can't imagine it would be that hard to make a program that writes over the data of X file with zeroes. *BAM*, problem solved, no wasted time or items.
Isn't there even a contest of some sort in which a hard drive is o
Re: (Score:2)
Deleting data is really really hard. If one is storing large amounts of data it is difficult to put a system in place which can prove that every copy in your posession has been deleted. Think about the work of sifting through thousands of write-once offline backups, be it tapes or CDs or whatever, locating the data, copying the original minus the data and destroying the originals. If that's not hard enough, what about data that's not in discrete files. Say there's a PostgreSQL database that's zipped and spans a thousand peices of physical media. The only way to delete a record is to load the whole database then redump it. And don't forget about regenerating all the index files. And dealing with obsolete file formats.
This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.
Which makes them look even more dumb for not asking how difficult/expensive the task is in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
If the law has changed since then, changing the requirements, then sure they need to go back to the vendor and ask what can be done about it. To be honest, if the alternative is that an operator can casually alter the audit trail and delete records,
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.
I really can't believe I'm saying this, but this sounds like a technical problem that really does need a legal solution.
You are quite right regarding how difficult it can be to delete every copy of a piece of data, on the technical side.
Instead of all of that, it might be easier to enact an actual law saying a recording of a conversation is only legally valid for that time. Or at the least, have both. Then if one side fails you, the other hopefully will help pick up the slack.
No calls recorded before that
Re: (Score:2)
> No calls recorded before that time would be admissible in court...
Recordings of lawyer-client conversations are already inadmissible. The problem is that there are plenty of ways for the prosecution to use them that do not involve producing them in court or even admitting that they exist.
Re: (Score:2)
Would it be possible to encrypt all the mediafiles and keep the keys in a separate database? That way one could just delete the keys to make the data impossible to recover without actually going through all the tapes. Of course, you'd keep a backup of the keys, but that would be much easier to keep track of.
Re: (Score:2)
There are many possible solutions, but they all involve actually thinking through the the problem rather than blindly purchasing an off-the-shelf "solution" from the vendor with the smoothest salesman.
Wish i was surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
But im not, really. Having worked for the Dutch police twice now, I can safely say that the majority of their IT staff are completely clueless. A few years ago they "outsourced" their IT to a seperate entity to handle all their IT, but this entity was staffed mostly with the people they already had, so there wasn't any actual increase of knowledge (as far as I could tell). They got a nice fat bag of money and an unclear manifest, all paid for by us - the Dutch taxpayer - and this is what we get.
The Netherlands: No privacy, no competence and instead of capable beatcops we get highway robbery in the form of a cop with a lasergun having his daylong break sitting behind a bush next to our highways. And they wonder why the populace is starting to hate law enforcement.
Do yourself a favor and do a search on Google for "C2000", another one of the Dutch police success stories.
I could weep. Or well....puke really.
You appear to have adopted British methods (Score:2)
After all, in 1688 we acquired our Government from the Netherlands and it was a big success story. Now it's time to return the favor. Gordon Brown is not quite as glamorous as William of Orange, but I'm sure we'd let you have him and his Cabinet for free.
We also
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine the same attitude and objectives, but now with competent staff...
Will it blend? (Score:2)
That is the question.
Call Tom Dickson.
Delete, Remove, & Drop (Score:5, Insightful)
For those who are offering commands to get rid of the data, you need to understand the why they will not work.
This issue is that the storage system used is designed is such a way that you CAN NOT modify any data once it is written to the disk.
Once the data is written, it can not be modified or deleted. Now, the reasoning behind this is so the police can not digitally manipulate the timestamps or data in any way. This is to protect the integrity of the data so it can withstand legal challenges.
They are faced with a 'catch 22' situation. If they can figure out a way to delete a 'prohibited conversation' they could theoretically modify the data too. Opening up the possibility of having a criminal conversation being invalidated.
WORM drive (Score:2)
When I worked at fortune 500 company we had these Write Once Ream Many dive systems to record images of contracts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_Once_Read_Many [wikipedia.org]
The drive platters looked like CD recordable media in a plastic case about the size of a large pizza. Two machines would write out the data and when full the platters went into one of the jukeboxes (readers). Not a bad system, a bit slow. 90's tech.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What company was that? Goatse?
Re:Delete, Remove, & Drop (Score:4, Interesting)
If they can figure out a way to delete a 'prohibited conversation' they could theoretically modify the data too.
Technically there is no need to make the conversations themselves immutable. You just need to be able to verify that the recording you have is the one which was originally recorded. A one-way hash can serve this purpose. For each recording, store the conversation itself in an erasable/mutable medium, but record a hash of the conversation in append-only storage (with multiple distributed backups). If you need to show that the recording is legit, compare it with the hash. If you need to delete something, record the deletion in the append-only medium and then remove it from the mutable storage. The hash will remain, but you can't use the hash to obtain information about the conversation without the original recording.
Bonus: You can recognize unauthorized deletions by comparing the mutable and immutable records.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just remember that the backups and audits ALSO have to be destroyed. All of them. Especially the backups. And keep an audit maybe of the destruction of that information.
Re: (Score:2)
Right. I wasn't addressing the problem of actually destroying all the copies, just the conflict between immutability for audit-trail purposes and the need to delete certain conversations.
For dealing with the copies, a good start would be the suggestion made my another commenter to encrypt the archived copies of the conversations (with unique keys) and hold the keys in a separate database. That way you could back up the conversations themselves by whatever means are most efficient, and to effectively destroy
Re: (Score:2)
Tell that to O.J.'s lawyers and anybody else who wants to claim, or actually believes, that the police might want to tamper with evidence to frame them. Or tell that to all the commentators on fark who are certain that the police would delete evidence to help protect one of their own. You should understand that these kind of enterprise storage systems that protect data from any kind of tampering (and "losing" data is a kind of tampering) even by system administrators are intended to be used in lieu of moun
Re: (Score:2)
No, deletion is modification.
==
Phonecall 1: Hi John, you remember that tomorrow is the day we'll gather? At 9pm? You'll be there? Cool.
Phonecall 2: Hi Mark, remember the roleplaying session tomorrow? At 9pm? You'll be there?
[Two days later]
Phonecall 3: Yeah, hi Dianne. Yeah, too bad you couldn't make it. The group has finalized the plans on how to kill the president. We'll go ahead next week, same time. You have to be there!
==
Now delete phonecall 2 from the records. .. would that be .. uhm .. tampe
About destroying not deleting... (Score:2)
The issue is the difference between destroying (in practical terms: erasing), as they are legally obliged to do, and deleting it. This pdf document [www.nrc.nl]linked from the article explains in laymen's language how the "pointer (or route) in the system to the data concerned" is removed, making 1) the data inaccessible to investigators, and 2) freeing up the space of a hard disk array for new data, and then goes on explaining that the data may theoretically still be retrieved from the disks if not yet overwritten. The
No problem? (Score:2)
Dutch justice... (Score:4, Informative)
Over the past few years quite a few criminal cases were lost exactly because of this problem. In Amsterdam a huge case against Hell's Angels [www.nos.nl] went south in 2007 (everyone was set free) because they didn't destroy tapped recordings with attorneys. Last year it happened again [www.nos.nl] (dutch links, sorry).
I hope someone got canned because of this, but given our incompetent justice department I really can't see that happening. Phone tapping has reached epidemic proportions over here (highest number of taps per person in the western world), as it's much easier than actually investigating a case based on given evidence.
Funny that this is the second article on our incapable justice system within a day on /., go us \o/
Re: (Score:2)
When people get off on a crime because of a technicality, a legal oversight, then your laws are broken. In turn that comes down to voting for, or electing politicians who vote for bad laws.
The voters should be canned for continuing to vote in cheating politicians and voting for laws with loopholes like this.
Dutch secret service tapping journalists... (Score:2)
Illegal tapping of newspapers in the NL:
http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/07/09/nisnews-nl-dutch-newspaper-suing-state-for-phone-tapping-journalists/ [journalism.co.uk]
http://badnewsfromthenetherlands.blogspot.com/2009/10/court-intelligence-service-illegally.html [blogspot.com]
The Amsterdam court has determined that the General Intelligence Service AIVD broke the law of freedom of press by tapping the phones of journalists of the Telegraaf daily
We knew at some point (Score:2)
But then we got high.
Re: (Score:2)
Personal data sent to a non-EU country? (Score:2)
Doesn't that violate EU "data privacy" laws?
Re: (Score:2)
If you automatically tape every phone call on a certain phone, you have to sort later (and according to the law delete calls from and to the lawyer).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Every knows (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever his mental state, according to the official numbers (which don't include the secret service) in the Netherlands the number of wire taps is over 10 times that of the number in the US and we've only got 15 million people...
Re: (Score:2)
Some official numbers about tapping in the NL http://www.bit-byters.net/?p=50 [bit-byters.net]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
i know about at least 1 person for 100% sure he works for secret intelligence
Only one? I know 3:
Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure (Score:3, Funny)
rm -rf /
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking a large hammer would do it... or run over the device with a tank.
Re: (Score:2)
A nice little woodchipper would do the trick.
Re:Nuke it from orbit its the only way to be sure (Score:5, Funny)
Store the data on your Sidekick device?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or here's a nice idea; "DON'T USE THE ILLEGALLY TAPED CALLS".
Yes, I know that sounds obvious, but the Dutch police HAS used such calls. Several cases have been thrown out in the past due to this and who knows in how many cases it WASN'T discovered.
The problem is that when they finally do figure out how to delete the illegally taped calls, will they delete them?
Better way: (Score:2)
cat
Makes data recovery much more difficult
Re: (Score:2)
Get modern; use thermite or go home.
Re: (Score:2)
I think most organizations would run into similar problems if ordered to prove that they had destroyed all copies of some specific data. This is much harder than rendering it inaccessible by normal methods.
Re: (Score:2)
That is indeed the actual point in this case.
The system is designed intentionally to write data once and NEVER allow it to be modified, so it can not be corrupted or tainted after submitted into evidence. So BOTH sides of the case could know for sure that the data is the same from when it was checked into evidence till the end of time.
So yes, they can't do anything about it, and that is EXACTLY how they requested that it work in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? Have you actually used an MS product? I've been using them and in IT for 20 years and never had data deleted, don't know anyone who has. I've seen a few apps crash and some work lost, but I've had that happen on every OS I've dealt with as well.
Either way, it most certainly would require some sort of interaction, but I'm guessing they haven't got that far in your grade school physics class yet, no action/reaction or cause and effect yet.
If you're going to troll you are going to have to do better
Re: (Score:2)
There probably is one, but it's irrelevant. An Israeli company isn't subject to Dutch law, which is the law that would be relevant here.
Lesson of the day? Buy local, folks!