Thankfuly, the data may not be gone, at least not all of it:
Are there any other backups? Don’t they routinely make backups of their data at KSU?
I’ll make a prediction, hoping that I’m wrong: I predict that there will be no official repercussions from this erasure. No one will be censured, no one will lose their job, no one will even be called out as the responsible party.
And the lawsuit will be stymied, dead in the water, without this data and so the election results, which people already don’t have confidence in, will stand.
Heck, at the rate things are going, Mr. Kemp will prolly win his election after declaring what a great thing it is that all the data was lost, since he prolly wouldn’t still be running for office if they had found it <wink wink>.
Hey, how did all that voter ID help to prevent this kind of fraud? It did help, right?
I’m also amazed that a machine that doesn’t produce a paper trail would still be in use; I thought we all figured out that was just asking for trouble many years ago now.
TL; DR: The thread title has the most important bits in it. Hopefully with this thread we can keep track of news and discuss events as they happen and not lose track of what could be a very important lawsuit.
Losing election data, who really cares. The important thing is that the right person won.
Besides, how can you doubt the results of the election after we have implemented Voter ID which ensures the integrity of the election?
The machine was known to have security vulnerabilities, those vulnerabilities were known to the public (including say, foreign agents [or domestic], who wished to sway the election), we know that there were russian efforts in directly affecting election results, though it did seem as though our security had thwarted such attempts in the 2016, or at least, there was no evidence that they succeeded.
But, there are two ways of making sure that there is no evidence of a crime. The first is not to do it. The second is to wipe the election servers clean to remove the evidence.
Because someone’s personal computer is exactly equivalent to the server that holds the voting data of a state.
But, yeah, now that you bring it up, if we are going to have that many investigations over a person’s use of a home computer, and the possibility that it may have had some level of compromise that may have possibly leaked some sort of secret to the hackers who had already hacked the state department, then you would absolutely support investigations into who wiped a server clean that is directly related to the integrity of our democracy, right?
Good attempt at false equivalence, but it only makes your position look disingenuous if you were for the investigations into her server, but not into one that actually could have had evidence of actual threats to our democracy.
Pure speculation on my part, but that kinda sounds like the wipe was in error. Like, the KSU techs wiped it and then went, “Oh shit, we better reach out to the FBI and see if they still have their image.” My default level of cynicism and partisan bias makes me think the wipe was probably deliberate, but that part made me question my assumption a little.
IANAL, but I am a computer forensics guy. My understanding was that when evidence has been spoiled, either deliberately or through negligence, the evidence may be inferred to have been unfavorable to the party responsible for the spoliation. This article claims:
That article cites a book that describes cases in which people were punished for wiping data. I haven’t read the whole chapter, so I’m not sure if any of the cases it describes are relevant to the KSU case. Hopefully one of our resident lawyers can comment.
May have been an “error” for the techs that discovered that it had been wiped, but may not have been such an error the person who actually did the wiping.
I expect they reached out to the FBI because there’s not much point in wiping a drive if another party has a backup. The criminal covering up his crime has incentive to find out if that will be sufficient, and perhaps to point a co-conspirator to wiping that backup as well.
Also, what OttoDaFe said. There’s no way to credibly argue in court this is other than a cover-up now. So whatever was on those drives can be inferred to have been such strong evidence of such utter wrongdoing that several persons being charged with a blatant cover-up and losing their careers would be “preferable.” Wow.
