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I wish the best of luck to Jason for getting his stuff back. Forensics/law enforcement is notorious for not returning your stuff in a timely manner (think years
by markbao 17y ago
I wish the best of luck to Jason for getting his stuff back. Forensics/law enforcement is notorious for not returning your stuff in a timely manner (think years) without a lawsuit.
Hope he has an offsite backup.
- ErrantX 17y agoJust to stick up for the Forensics guys - it's not usually our fault unless there is actually evidence on there. Turn around times (at least in the UK) for actually processing evidence is less than a month. It's the police/prosecutors that cause all the hold ups.
- markbao 17y agoSorry—definitely didn't mean to frame you guys. Definitely aware of that, which is why I mentioned law enforcement in general. The whole thing kind of makes sense (holding equipment to make sure no potential evidence is released without a final decision)—but it's still frustrating and it doesn't seem like there's a good solution that makes it easier for both parties.
- ErrantX 17y agoHeh, no worries :) in many cases illegitimate delays are simply due to incompetence, so it's good to complain then. Turn around is pretty good; we serve a mid to large police force in the UK (around 5000 computer investigations a year). Average return time for evidence where no charges were brought last year was about 2 1/2 months. Complaints over delays were in the 10's.
- markbao 17y agoWOW. That is really impressive. Serious kudos for efficiency. It's weird to think that at any given moment, you're subject to a search and seizure (or any other kind of law enforcement ...enforcing) which will interrupt your life for sometime around one month to (in most cases) a year or so. Really kind of makes you want to hustle and get to work when you're not being served a warrant :P
- ErrantX 17y agoAgain I can only speak for the UK but.. the chances of you having a search warrant issued on you is pretty low if you are not doing anything illegal.
- rbanffy 17y ago> chances of you having a search warrant issued on you is pretty low if you are not doing anything illegal. It's the definition of "illegal" that worries me.
- jrockway 17y agoEspecially in the UK, where writing a book that criticizes pseudoscience is "illegal", as is publishing photographs of celebrities. I'm surprised there are any journalists left there at all.
- dctoedt 17y agoWait a minute -- even when no charges are brought, you keep other people's computer gear, ON AVERAGE, for two and a half months? Like hell that's "pretty good" turnaround.
- ErrantX 17y agoWell, those are pushed up by one or two cases that took (to my recollection) the best part of 6 months to unpick. Also a reasonable number are charged on an unrelated matter (for example they are stopped for drugs possession and carrying cash (profits from crime) and have a laptop confiscated because most of them are money laundering the cash too. In those cases if you con't find money laundering it goes down as "not charged"). Of the rest; the vast majority were legitimately suspected of a crime (I can count on my fingers the number who were not - to my mind anyway). Proving it either way is, I feel, reasonable.
- zackattack 17y agoFriendly reminder: Everyone should always have an offsite backup! (one which they've practiced restoring!)
- joezydeco 17y agoHow do you practice a restore on a backup that you don't quite know for sure is a usable backup? That's a big fear of mine. I'm not about to wipe my system clean and hope the test works 100%.
- protomyth 17y agoDepending on your OS you could create a VM and restore to that.
- nailer 17y agoThat's why I like continuous checksum (ie, rsync) type backups.
- shimon 17y agoIf you backup to a hard drive, you can simply swap your main and backup drives every now and then. If you have three drives, you can always be using one as main, one as local backup, and the third locked up offsite as the "house burns down" backup. Then swap the offsite and local backups every month. I'm just starting to do this and it feels great. I thought about the money I pay for renters insurance, and then I realized that something much harder to replace than my furniture and other physical possessions was vulnerable not only to fire/natural disaster but plain old disk failure.
- joezydeco 17y agoThat's a great idea, except my main drive is bolted inside of a really hard-to-disassemble iMac. There's externally bootable drives, and I guess that's my only easy option.
- noonespecial 17y agoI am impressed that he said that they did very little damage during the search. The last time I saw a search and seizure, it made a tornado look like a minor incident.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- warfangle 17y agoWhich is crazy, because doing things neatly and methodically would find potential evidence that haphazard whirlwind searching would never find. (Compare NYPD Blue serving warrants to CSI Las Vegas serving warrants)