Have Terabytes of Enron Data Quietly Gone Missing? (muckrock.com) 85
Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz quotes MuckRock: Government investigations into California's electricity shortage, ultimately determined to be caused by intentional market manipulations and capped retail electricity prices by the now infamous Enron Corporation, resulted in terabytes of information being collected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This included several extremely large databases, some of which had nearly 200 million rows of data, including Enron's bidding and price processes, their trading and risk management systems, emails, audio recordings, and nearly 100,000 additional documents. That information has quietly disappeared, and not even its custodians seem to know why.
The web page where a defense contractor hosts the data has been down since 2013, and after a one-month wait they replied to a request by stating the data was "under review" and "currently not accessible," adding that it might never be available again. And while a U.S. government site also claims they offer a trio of datasets on CD, that agency "has not responded to repeated requests for these datasets sent over the past two months."
The site also instructs visitors to email Lockheed Martin, who maintains some of the data -- but the provided email address bounces.
The web page where a defense contractor hosts the data has been down since 2013, and after a one-month wait they replied to a request by stating the data was "under review" and "currently not accessible," adding that it might never be available again. And while a U.S. government site also claims they offer a trio of datasets on CD, that agency "has not responded to repeated requests for these datasets sent over the past two months."
The site also instructs visitors to email Lockheed Martin, who maintains some of the data -- but the provided email address bounces.
Why should we care? (Score:4, Insightful)
What difference does it make at this point? The case is closed, the company is gone, people have gone to jail. It's completely irrelevant today. There are also plenty of public records of the trials if anyone wants to know the details.
Re:Why should we care? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Found the corporate biatch
Re:Why should we care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you not only have forgotten the lesson, it appears that you never knew the lesson to begin with.
The Enron disaster didn't occur because of "government price fix". It all blew up because Enron was manipulating markets after deregulation.
The disaster came from Enron's illegal goddamn behavior. People went to prison over it.
https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]
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The Enron disaster didn't occur because of "government price fix". It all blew up because Enron was manipulating markets after deregulation.
I never followed the details of Enron all that carefully. IIRC, the California electricity market blew up because California regulated the rates PG&E (etc.) could sell electricity but deregulated the rates at which they could buy it. Wholesale prices went up (that's where Enron fits in) and the electric companies took a bath.
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Not quite. It's a good deal more complicated than that. Wholesale prices went up because Enron (and others) were taking power plants offline in order to extort customers and drive up prices artificially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why should we care? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying, "If the government hadn't made murder illegal, then Charlie Manson would never have become a murderer."
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No, they would have gouged consumers directly instead of by proxy
They couldn't have. People didn't really care if Enron gouged someone and the details were hidden from them. But if average customer bills went up by 300%? They absolutely would have cared and rioted inside Enron headquarters.
Having the details hidden from customers is what allowed Enron to raise the rates on distributors.
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California is STILL paying off debt from this mess as well. They had a pretty balanced budget before all this went down too.
There were many reasons for that, but the Dot-Com collapse had a far far larger impact on the housing market, and California's budget is tied to the boom-bust cycle of the general economy.
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It isn't irrelevant. There are companies like Enron out there right now.
That doesn't explain what anyone would want to do with the data from the Enron case. If you're trying to make a case against another corporation, you're going to need data about THEIR activities, not Enron's.
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Let's say you want to train some machine learning algorithms to recognize suspicious trading patterns. Here's a dataset that came from a known bad actor. Could it be useful in identifying patterns of suspicious behavior? I'd suggest it might be of some use...
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Datasets are usually covered in any introductory course.
Given how much Enron was cooking the books (the scandal destroyed Enron's accounting firm), you can find out far more about Enron did by looking at their public records.
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Right, people are tempted to do illegal things to make more money. The same forces have been working for 10,000 years or so, and its not going to change.
Why does having terabytes of data, virtually of which is mundane and completely off-topic, so important to learn that lesson? Even if you wanted to study it, how do you sort out the relevant parts? How would you even start? Every Ken Lay email? The prosecutors did that for you already, at least to the extent practical, read the transcripts (w
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Because of PG&E's bankruptcy. And the need to track down funds that might still be parked in various places overseas.
And while a U.S. government site also claims they offer a trio of datasets on CD
It would be interesting to see if anyone that took delivery of one of these. Can we get them put on line somewhere? Turned over to a trusted library? Or have you already been visited and served with a National Security Letter?
Please post pictures of dead canary or empty cage.
Sidney Powell book and the Mueller investigation (Score:2, Insightful)
What difference does it make at this point? The case is closed, the company is gone, people have gone to jail. It's completely irrelevant today. There are also plenty of public records of the trials if anyone wants to know the details.
It may be due to the upcoming Mueller report and Sidney Powell, who wrote an expose book [licensedtolie.com] a couple of years back about the FBI.
She was recently interviewed [youtube.com] on Mark Levin's show, and has some very condemnatory information about Mueller, some people on Mueller's team, and the FBI in general.
(NB: Sydney Powell is a former federal prosecutor, worked at the DOJ for 10 years, and lead counsel in over 500 federal appeals. Highly credible, whose information can't be dismissed out of hand.)
The Enron data might have b
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That's obviously a conspiracy theory or something. /s
Obviously the Muller is a perfect guy, and none of his prior enron cases weren't thrown out because he was inventing evidence of crimes and ended up being lambasted by the appeals court for it.
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Until the statute of limitations for corporate malfeasance times-out the info, it is of value to interested parties in civil and crimilnal actions, Since Enron no longer maintains/controls that trove, destroying it is... unuseful. It should be kept available for subpoe
Trumpies covering up frauds again (Score:1)
Like he never had deals with Russia, lol. What a dumb traitor.
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Because they have a large number of employees with secret and above classifications. If you get a contract and then have to hire people, it can take about 20-30 months just to get a decent amount of people through the process.
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employees with secret and above classifications
What is it about Enron and/or PG&E that require secret classification?
Other than the details of their nuclear operations, most of what goes on can be handled by their room-temperature IQ PHBs.
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Governments typically require some classification for their work even if it's completely unnecessary for the job at hand. Governments also tend to have a lot of cross-talk and you suddenly sit in a meeting that you should have classifications for.
This is about governments picking LM over other contractors, LM is a safe choice, even if the mission changes.
2013? Damn, too early... (Score:2)
Trump is already headed for prison for fraud (Score:1)
There's no reason for you to tapdance in defense of a traitor, faggot. Trump hangs either way, it's all over now. Mueller has his entire family on a leash.
PG&E? (Score:2)
The timing of noticing this data loss could be that evidence of power companies' neglect can be found in decades old Enron docs.
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Well they have some problems with other wildfire, but the 'camp fire' one? That's going to land on someone else's head, with their little microfit setup that caused it.
Why Data is missing (Score:2)
I wish I wasn't under a NDA, because I could speak truth to some really bad issues. Unless I'm under subpoena, I can't say any more.
Damn (Score:2)
I'm so used to smelling rat when it comes to corporations and the government and the connections and overseas accounts. Lately I've been smelling hundreds of rats.
The biggest rat so far was when, the day before 9/11, Rumsfeld reported $2.3 trillion missing at the DoD. Neatly done.
I'm beginning to suspect it's possible there are thousands of rats like this Enron rat stuffed into thousands of closets. Once the news has faded away, we forget. Too bad that isn't impossible.
Not quiet anymore! (Score:2)
Everybody on slashdot knows now. Does anybody else matter?