You are likely not a lawyer, and even if you are, you are not my lawyer.
A friend has asked me to help him clone a hard drive attached to a computer belonging to a company of which he is one of three co-owners. He and one of the other owners are in a dispute with the third. The machine is located in the office of the company, and the work is to be done off-hours, presumably, without the knowledge of the third owner.
He assures me that the company owns the computer, and that he can authorize the work. I have no reason to disbelieve him, except for the circumstances already outlined. But the whole thing feels a little shady to me. Nonetheless, I’m leaning toward helping him – he’s my friend, after all. But he’s not such a great friend that I trust him completely.
If I do help him, can anyone offer advice as to how to protect myself from becoming entangled in possible legal problems down the road? My thought was basically to have him sign something stating that he’s authorizing the work, and perhaps to charge him a nominal fee, in the hope of making it clear that I’m doing some work on his behalf and at his request, and not engaging in some sort of conspiracy with him.
How do computer repair shops deal with this sort of thing? They can’t possibly verify the ownership of every PC that passes through their doors.
I did a little googling in the hope of finding a suitable document on line that I could at least use as a template, but haven’t had any luck finding anything great yet.
Protect yourself by not doing this. Come into an office, when it’s closed, and clone a hard drive? Presumably without leaving any trace that such a thing has been done? No. Don’t do it. If this were all on the up-and-up, the partners would be handling their dispute through lawyers, and legally and openly, not surreptitiously.
I’ve gotten similar requests from people I know in the past, and I’ve always managed to avoid getting involved.
It sounds like there’s a lot of potential for you to get in trouble here. Most obviously, what are you going to do if, right in the middle of your operation, the third partner walks in? Maybe he forgot his keys or something. And there you are. Could go very wrong.
I agree with this. Don’t do it. You don’t want to get tangled up in what sounds like a legal fight between these people. This kind of work should be done under the direction of legal counsel.
Also, if the guy is trying to preserve evidence in preparation for litigation, he will need to do so in a forensically sound manner – collecting the evidence effectively, preventing alteration of the evidence, maintaining chain of custody, etc. I don’t know what your background is, Kyrie Eleison, but unless you’re a trained forensic examiner, you will probably not be able to meet those requirements.
Finally, in some states, computer forensic examiners are required to be licensed private investigators before they can conduct evidence collection and examinations. If your friend is trying to collect evidence for future litigation, and you do it, only to find out that your state requires that work to be done by licensed PIs… well, it won’t be good for anyone.
Tell your friend to engage the right professional assistance.
It might have been more accurate to say that there is about to be a dispute between these guys – they haven’t confronted the third guy yet. For that reason, I don’'t want to give out too much detail about the circumstances. It seems unlikely that he will stumble on this board, but better safe than sorry.
The story I’m told is that they want a backup of the hard drive of this machine because they’re worried about what will happen when they do confront him. They’re concerned that he’ll destroy or abscond with customer information that’s housed in a proprietary database on that machine. At first glance to me, it doesn’t seem like they’re doing anything shady, but just want to take reasonable steps to protect themselves before going any further.
My first response was to give him advice on how he could safeguard himself by making a copy of the drive himself, but he’s not comfortable around computers, and followed up by asking for my help. Although I’d like to help him, I think my next step will be to recommend that he take the machine in to a repair shop, and ask them to make a backup, or take steps to institute company-wide backups. It’s a small outfit though, and they don’t currently have any IT support, which might make the latter tough for him.
Thanks for the advice. I was hesitant enough to get involved to make the initial post, and I’m just leaning more toward staying out of the middle of this as a result of your responses.
Providing training/a procedure sounds safer than doing it yourself. Ask him to bring to your shop a computer similar to the one he wants to clone. (same model, initial OS image, etc)
Play with it until you have the cloning procedure down pat. Print out for him a paper guide with a series of screenshots/every single step included. Have him practice on the machine there in your presence. I mean, it’s usually just plug in an external drive, start it up, press a key to choose the boot device, choose the external drive, which has the cloning program on it, then clone to a second external drive. Done.
It seems a lot safer, especially if you decline to ask details on exactly what he wants this capability for. Then again, IANAL, since you already know it’s supposed to be for something shady, maybe you should decline entirely.
If someone wants to murder someone, asking you to do it is totally illegal. But if you provide them tactical training on a private shooting range, showing them how to move and point their gun and having them practice on interior urban assault courses that are similar to residential homes, it’s legal. Even legal to put a face they printed out from a photo on the practice targets. In this hypothetical, though, you can’t provide the training if you know it’s for committing a murder.
If you have a reasonable belief he is a principle in this company and authorized to hire you then you have nothing to fear, except maybe being dragged in to court as witness or falsely arrested for some crime. I know people who have done things like this, nothing bad happened, but I wouldn’t do it, if I’m going to take the risk of a lot of aggravation it’s going to have be for my own crazy idea, not someone else’s.
I performed some computer work at the direction of our company’s lawyers that still landed me on the stand as a witness in a dispute between the owners. The lawyer for one of the owners was a particularly nasty piece of work. Even though the idiotic line of questions directed at me only only served to make their side look stupid, I’d rather not be in the same room with that jackass if I can help it.