On Friday, January 25, 2002, at 04:47 PM, Carl Remick 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.
paper shredding, as far as i am aware, can be pretty thorough, and that stuff will have gone to landfills a long time ago, to boot. in terms of electronic files, if they destroyed the physical media, then there's no way to get at it. if they did security wipes of the media, it might be possible theoretically, but even then the odds might be long, depending on what they used and how determined they were (one suspects they were quite determined), and it could take a long time and cost a lot of money whether retrieval was successful or not.
>
> 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." 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?
>
> Carl
>
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