Comments on: Office of Special Counsel chief needs a lawyer

By: SoulGlo

SoulGlo — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:13:35 +0000

Our tax dollars being used for $400 hand towels. I guess Mr. Bloch has never heard of Wal-Mart.

By: Feedie

Feedie — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:37:58 +0000

chances are that Bloch is the good guy in all of this.

I sure wouldn’t rule it out. With this administration, you can’t tell who (if anyone) is running what .

By: ilitigant

ilitigant — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:36:57 +0000

Stop looking at the obvious gang. There’s more to this than meets the casual eye.

By: Buford Gooch

Buford Gooch — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:37:16 +0000

At my house, the help uses the $400 towels for washing cars. Nothing less than an $800 towel is going to touch the hands of my family.

By: Maxx

Maxx — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:24:07 +0000

At least according to the Washington Post, Bloch liked to waste money on items like $400 handtowels for his office bathroom

If the Washington Post is against Bloch, then chances are that Bloch is the good guy in all of this. I’ve never seen any kind of towel that cost more than twenty bucks, where exactly are these four hundred dollar towels for sale?

By: RBMN

RBMN — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:21:00 +0000

SeniorD on May 7, 2008 at 9:19 AM

There’s no way to limit the number of overwriting passes. If the “wipe” program only does three passes, just run it ten times to get thirty. The reason it takes multiple passes is that the write head doesn’t track the exact same line every time. The idea is, if you overwrite enough times, the head will hit the right place often enough.

By: snaggletoothie

snaggletoothie — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:25:04 +0000

$400 hand towels? Are they made of gold? Did he buy them from his wife’s interior decorating company?What kind of person thinks this is OK and what kind of person gives him a job where he can do this? And my sense is that he has never done any good for any whistleblowers.

By: SeniorD

SeniorD — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:19:33 +0000

Most, if not all, disk wipers only go to 8 levels of wiping. NSA prevents commercial merchandise from exceeding their ability to read wiped drives (10x). If the Government wants the information on your hard drive, they’ll get it through the time honored principle of residual magnetic resonance.

He’s not out of the woods by a long shot.

By: E1701

E1701 — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:51:16 +0000

I gotta second that. If you’re a technician told to clean up a virus/malware infection, and things are bad enough to require a reformat (something I have way too much experience with), the very first thing you do is a system backup. Unless – unless the client specifically tells you not to do a backup.

On the upside, Bloch is clearly a computer illiterate, and had no idea how to perform basic maintenance on his own, or this may not have been uncovered. Hiring an outside tech to wipe the drive without backups is suspicious because you have to request it: wiping it yourself as part of a normal repair process can be chalked up to simple experience. In the latter case questions would be raised about backups, but there’d be no evidence of deliberate obstruction.

By: evilned

evilned — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:07:51 +0000

I don’t know much about this guy, other then he is a moron. Calling Geeks on Call to erase his hard drives makes him look guilty even if he was telling the truth.

There are freely available tools that will do DOD level wipes on drives. If the Techs used one of these, the FBI forensics people will get nothing.

On the flip side, if they were combatting a virus, (And I have seen isolated systems get hit so bad they had to be formatted), the first thing the techs would have/should have done was make a backup of the drives to secure any data on them.

This would have made it look less like obstruction and more like they were trying to clean up a virus. Of course, those files would then be available to the FBI for review.

Catch-22 :)