Duane Cunningham
Member
Isn't destroying evidence a crime?
Yep:
Not quite scott-free (Obstruction of Justice) but damned if a year of house arrest ain't better than years in jail.
Isn't destroying evidence a crime?
Not quite scott-free (Obstruction of Justice) but damned if a year of house arrest ain't better than years in jail.
And probably a lot of illegal porn.
If he made the hard drives "disappear" then what's the point of smashing his HDD-less computers?
If the computer is smashed to shit... you must acquit.
i would have taken out the drives, smashed them and tossed the remains in random garbage cans. then i would replace the drive and load it up with cat pics. smashing the computer itself is pointless.
data can still be recovered from a smashed drive, smashing a hard drive wont save you, he got off by hiding them
The FBI initially interviewed Miller in 2011.
When they came back with a search warrant, they found that his hard drives were nowhere to be found and that Miller had smashed his computers.
That or Beat 'em up.Guess his favorite genre is hack n slash!
DOD 5220.22-M and DBAN wipes take some time. Destroying the platters is a lot quicker (though not fool-proof... platters can still be reassembled). Ideally you'd do both. Wipe it, drill it, and turn it on and listen to the platters shatter when it spins, then replace the drive in the computer so no one's the wiser.Why smash them? Why not just format the drives?
What I don't get is how he even knew to do that. I though search warrents were served then and there. He smashed things, which suggests he had forewarning of what was coming.
Haha, well done.Oh the files are IN the computer!
Depends how much time he had and lets be honest he wasn't going to get those computers back in a long ass time if it all, probably didn't lose much by doing it.
So I better not destroy my hard drives in case the Feds eventually serve me a warrant?
How is destroying his drives illegal BEFORE a warrant was issued?
Clearly a well thought out economic gamble, but he'd look like an idiot if they had enough on him to get him without the hard drives because he'd have both charges.
I think perhaps the better move might have been full disk encryption using something like TrueCrypt. With a sufficiently complex master password and a plausible deniability partition he'd have a few opportunities to defend himself using either silence or misdirection (depending on if the court viewed encryption passwords as compellable, which as far as I can tell is a mixed issue in jurisprudence right now).
I'm guessing the punishment for destroying evidence is less severe than the total punishment for whatever he had on his computers.
i would have taken out the drives, smashed them and tossed the remains in random garbage cans. then i would replace the drive and load it up with cat pics. smashing the computer itself is pointless.
And probably a lot of illegal porn.
I would not risk anything for 20 years in prison.
Everything gotta go
If you're that worried about it then you have a contingency drive/computer that is walled off from any illegal activity. It's not hard to do and allows you to destroy what you need without an interruption of non-illegal activities.
He was probably innocent. I smash and hide HDDs as a hobby. I'm sure there are others who do as well
"FBI, open the door"
"OH SHIT"