FBI Not Allowed To Secretly Destroy Info On Other's Computers

from the seems-wise dept

A federal judge has told the FBI that they cannot access some unknown computers that don't belong to them and destroy data, though, the Justice Department is thinking about asking again. It seems that, somehow, some confidential information about an undercover operation from fifteen years ago was leaked during a court case. The FBI requested permission to go seek out computers that hold copies of this information and to destroy it. They don't say where the computers are, or how they know which computers have this information (if they know at all). It seems a little backwards that the FBI really believes that publicly available information can be "erased" like that. Especially now that the request to destroy the information is public, it's only guaranteed to show up in more places and get more attention from the public.

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  1.  

    The world of crime

    identicon
    dorpus, Oct 22nd, 2003 @ 4:20pm

    Nope, not that simple. What if the information contains data about mob informants, and the mob finds out about it? Then the mob can track down the informants and butcher their entire families.

    Going by FBI tendencies, I suspect this is really a false flag operation, and the data on the computers is already moot. The importance is in future operations.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    remember

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Oct 23rd, 2003 @ 6:10am

    how in Orwell's "1984" all printed information was burned immediately after it was read, so that the government's ever changing official story was the only story?

    Wouldn't it be cool if we could do that with computers?

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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