http://www.theeroticreview.com/discussion_boards/viewmsg.asp?MessageID=14033&boardID=25&page=1


makes one wonder that if they had a provider's laptop, and IF they got the provider's  TER login... couldn't they become her?

not saying it happened, I'm just sayin

Wannabe,

I heard that your wonderment actually happened somewhere in the Southwest U.S.  It IS strictly a rumor as far as I'm concerned.  My inquiry on the Legal Corner was to learn what could actually happen "if".  It has not happened to me, or anyone that I know.

It does give one cause to wonder "what if".  I give references to providers about their potential clients via email, and that opens a multitude of "what ifs".

Being proactive and aware is a good thing.  Yes?

to say the least- being prepared for the worst case scenario makes sense.
There are techniques and guidelines that providers, especially, should follow to keep all of us safe from you-know-who.

We are all glad that you were only "wondering" before rather than after.

Being alert and vigil is vital.

Yes, anything that was ever typed into a computer can be discovered by someone with enough skill as long as the hard drive is in tact. Deleted emails, deleted files are not really gone for good.

It is possible to get a subpoena an isp provider but it is very difficult and most will put upo a pretty good fight to protect your privavcy.

Most large city L.E. have people on their staff that can get almost anything off of your hard drive.However based on my experience representing others who have had a dust up with L.E. getting a subpoena is almost impossible unless drugs or other crimes are involved. Be clean of drugs or people who deal with them.

Speaking of potential problems in Illinos, please read the Illinois bill HB 6195

There have been numerous stories over the years about people getting tripped up by emails that they deleted only to find out that deleted is not the electronic equivalent of putting a paper document through a shredder and then burning the remnants.

Deleting something or putting it in your computer's trash and emptying it only means the computer is no longer keeping track of where the object was on the computer.  The actual data is still there until something else overwrites it.  There are programs you can use to more thoroughly delete stuff off your hard drive and of course some are better than others.

As I mentioned in another forum, I once attended a seminar for forensic computer techniques.  They stated the DoD had tools to recover data that was "securely" wiped 4 or 5 times.  That was not a civilian seminar, I lucked out and wormed my way into that group.  I was the only civ there, so the discussion of the tools wasn't a scare tactic or chest-pounding technique.

That was a long time ago, too.  The tools are probably better, easier, and cheaper.  Like vorlon said, literally overwriting the old 0's and 1's is the way to go, or literally incinerating the disk.

It's too bad they can't treat consenting adults like grown-ups.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of places where data is stored.  Most important are the endpoints, your computer, someone else's computer, and any online storage point where email might rest.  I think most other places along the route don't keep a lot of data and might only keep routing information.  That might say where you had been, but not what you were up to.

1. records on your computer which include hard drives, removable drives, nonvolatile storage

Once the data on a hard drive is overwritten, it's hard enough to recover that you'd have to be a threat to national security for them to spend that much money to recover and while the lore says overwrite 7x, it's probably closer to 1x on drives that you would be using these days. Like someone said, just putting something in the trash and then  emptying it doesn't create ANY difficulty in retrieving it.  There are secure-erase programs out there that will overwrite the data to your specifications.

Removable drives could be a double edged sword, if they can be associated with you, then overwriting data is best  , but if it can't, then maybe its a good solution.  There are secure thumb drives out there.

Unless you have a flash drive on your computer, you probably don't have much that would keep track of your activity.  

Depending on your network configuration and Windows, there may be logging of locations visited.  I'm not an expert on the mysteries of the windows registry or the other logging functions that windows does.

2. records on your router or other routers you access
Routers keep a log of locations visited, depending on the settings, that log can expire after a specific amount of time or it might only keep a specific amount of data, flushing the data that is oldest.

3. records of your activity stored by your ISP
I think some ISP's are more cooperative with enforcement, but they all are required to comply with court orders.  I don't believe they keep any content, only locations.

4. records of your emails stored by your email provider (google, yahoo, or your isp)
Similar to ISP's, they have to comply with legal requirements.  How long they keep email might depend on the provider (not ASP).  Also, they could be hacked, so that information is not necessarily totally secure.  I've heard hushmail encrypts everything they can.

5. Records on someone else's equipment could come back to bite you. Don't save email and you'll reduce the risk for others AND for yourself.

As an IT Pro, and with a Degree in IT Security, I can say with certainty that if it's electronically sent, stored, or received, or viewed on a PC it can be traced, tracked and found.  The only defense to any of this in my professional opinion is two-fold.

First, use a program like truecrypt (google it, it's free)tofully encrypt your hard drive, and secondly, look into any program (I would suggest wipedrive) that does a multiple-pass (3 or more) sequential write and re-write to ensure the data is as far removed as possible.  as the earlier poster said it IS possible with the right tools (albeit most local police departments don't have it, but may contract out for services) to get the data off a hard drive,  as far as removeable media, the best on the market is called "Ironkey" it's a military-grad USB flash drive that has hardware encryption built into it, and if you try to tamper with the case, or open it, the electronics inside are rendered inoperable and useless along with the data.

my2c