--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote: >
There seems to be a lot of techno savvy on the LBO
> list, so I'd like to pose this question: How
difficult would it be to
> reconstruct electronic and paper Enron files that
Arthur Andersen destroyed?
> My impression is that federal security and
intelligence agencies have
> data-retrieval technology that could do this
relatively easily.
I remember a case a few years back (can't remember the details, sorry, lack the encylopedic memory of some people on this list) where a bunch of files had been shredded, but they managed to reconstruct them. I think the methods used were pretty low tech, but you could probably do something intelligent with scanners and computers these days. Slow and tortuous though. If they were incinerated (which is what I think most places do these days), not a chance.
With computers its pretty difficult to totally erase stuff. Obviously deleting stuff won't work (though you'd be surprised by how many people don't realise this) - however on windows you can recover stuff relatively easily even if the harddrive has been reformatted. There are ways to do it, but unless you're relatively sophisticated, or have the software, beyond most people (include in most, panicking Anderson employees). You basically write 1s and 0s randomly to the entire drive repeatedly. Even after that you could probably recover something. Gelagnite's good...
It's quite possible that backups of this stuff exist somewhere at Andersons. Even if they explicitly tried to delete everything (and this was a company wide order), I imagine that lots of stuff would survive. Cost a lot to find it, inconvenience Andersons enormously (not that they could legitimately complain - but Bush could use it to excuse them), but you could do it. Be a lot of fun too...
Also there's copies of files, people's laptops with files they were working on and god knows what else.
> To me the great mystery of this affair is why
Andersen would compound its
> existing legal problems by engaging in further
criminal activity -- file
> destruction -- that would probably prove futile and
definitely destroy
> whatever remained of the firm's reputation. In the
House hearings
> yesterday, John Dingell characterized Andersen's
actions as "either
> criminally stupid, or stupidly criminal or both."
Presumably this wasn't an Anderson's decision, but the guy responsible for the audit who was responsible. Imagine he panicked. Happens a lot, as people don't expect to be found out, especially at his level. The hubris of the executive is a wonderful thing to behold.
> But all jokes about bean-counters aside, it's hard
to imagine a Big Five
> accounting firm could be that stupid. How damning
can those files be to
> drive Andersen to such desperate actions?
Well from conversations with people I know who have worked for the big three, they probably knew about the hole, but ignored it because of lucrative consultancy fees. Also if one looked closely, one would probably find that details of Enron's financial details were "leaked" to people working on consultancy for them who then used the figures to come up with a competitive tender...
Or maybe the guy was just crooked? I prefer the first, as it might bring down the rotten edifice of accountancy, consultants and all the other expensive parasites.
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