One of the big subplots is a hard drive they have stolen from a high-tech company. They got it and have their computer geek/wizard frantically trying to duplicate the hard drive, but he can’t crack the supposed high-grade military decryption. He needs more time but they have to give back the original hard drive to the bad guy.
OK, maybe there is something I am missing.
Can’t you just duplicate EVERYTHING on a hard drive, as-is, and then spend some leisurely time cracking the code while you give the original back to the bad guy? Sure - cracking the code to see what it all means could be tricky, but I thought pretty much any Windows program can simply copy from one hard drive to another, regardless of the gibberish content.
Or am I a total computer non-geek and you cannot duplicate hard drives until you open the content?
IIRC there are/were high security drives that have passwords locked into the drives firmware and prevent hardware access to the drive (ie blind copying) unless the correct password is given.
IDK but I’d think/hope the gov’t has the means to give highly sensitive material stored on hard drives copy protection at least as strong as that of a “Lion King” DVD (which, of course, can’t be duplicated without software that breaks the encryption).
Generally, the protection given to data is in the form of encryption and not via hardware. USB keys that come with encryption, Boot Locker in Windows 7, etc. With sufficient encryption, data can supposedly be protected to the extent that scads of computing power can be thrown at it, and by the time the data is finally exposed, the information is worthless and all people associated with the data when the cracking began are long since dead. This is more prevalent with cloud computing as you never know precisely where your data will be kept so you put it out in a “pre-destroyed” condition while tightly protecting the encryption keys which are the only practical way to make the data meaningful.
So the TV actors should have been able to quickly sector copy the drive and then hack away at it in their leisure. And if the opposing side maintained good security, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because the data thieves wouldn’t have been able to crack the encryption.
(Of course all this does not take into account the paranoid attributions of power given to the NSA in regards to getting around this stuff.)
If they picked and implemented the right system, the only way to get a copy of the encrypted data would involve taking apart the drive, which if it has a tamper-evident enclosure the Big Bad would notice it and the deal’s off.
But they seem to be reading the drive anyway, so just make a back up and give it back.
In general, yeah. This show is crappy and then some when it comes to data copying, management and so on. (As well as calling 911 when the guys with guns show up.)
(I also don’t get the Big Bad’s strategy at this point. The gig is up. Federal agents have been shot. Life as he knows it is over. Time to go to Brazil. Who cares about protecting data or anything anymore?)
*IMDb doesn’t list Martin Donovan’s character name!