Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

We all leave huge incriminating paper trails to some extent. This is why privacy is so important, because we’re all committing crimes in theory. That being said Manafort looks very very guilty and his crimes, which are financially based, I think are even more reprehensible in this era of global austerity and low economic growth.

Back to the privacy point, we are currently going through NIST 800-53 at work. We only need 800-171 but we thought the 800-53 standard would make us a better organization. So many things I didn’t think of. Do you have a micro-cut shredder first of all? Those Enron-esque cross-cut shredders don’t cut it anymore with open source machine learning that can easily reassemble those documents. Also, do you have an access code for your printer so the document only prints when he/she is up there, and doesn’t get left throughout the day in the tray for prying eyes? Also are your servers currently sitting in inventory up high on the shelves in case water gets into the building? So many things...

AmazonBasics 12-Sheet High-Security Micro-Cut Paper, CD, and Credit Card Shredder with Pullout Basket https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D7H8XB6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_zCfK...

Manaforts crimes are as bad as they are because he and his buddies were instrumental in destroying a country that was already fighting for its survival and many people have died and will continue to die as a result of this. If you compare the reaction to the VW scandal to what is happening here it is funny how the 'end result' is so much worse in the case of Manafort that it is a miracle he's just indicted for what are in essence financial issues.

The austerity and economic issues are very tiny part of the contrast here, the real damage is the instability in an already fragile region of the world and the machinations to act against the interests of almost all parties in the region except for the Russians.

Yes I see what you mean, and wow thanks for putting his crimes in a broader context.

It’s my hope that “financial crimes” are just going to be a convenient way to indict the many many people who have committed crimes like him.

Back in 2016, a weird / interesting / pretty smart idea in Clinton’s platform was to help the US deficit by only enforcing current tax laws. Lol that’s all it was, enforcing the laws that were already there to raise an additional 100 billion+ in revenue every year. It makes you think how many people are committing tax fraud at this very moment...

Matt Levine at Money Stuff has a recurring comment of (US) securities laws being the best tool currently available for what many people view as social issues.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-01-25/climate-c... and the linked https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-06/exxon-mig... are the examples I've found so far, but I remember him making the comment repeatedly.

How many of those tax laws were on the level of '3 felonies a day'? The US tax laws and their penalties can be pretty horrible, and you could possibly ruin a whole bunch of older middle class people who use something equivalent to turbotax badly.

>>It’s my hope that “financial crimes” are just going to be a convenient way to indict the many many people who have committed crimes like him.

They often are. Despite the many actually heinous crimes he committed, Al Capone was ultimately nailed for tax evasion.

> Those Enron-esque cross-cut shredders don’t cut it anymore with open source machine learning that can easily reassemble those documents.

That's interesting! When I googled for this, I found a few papers, but nothing like a git repository. Do you have more information?

If not, this would make a great blog post idea.

I remember there was also a big effort to reassemble the shredded files by the German Stasi after the fall of the wall, both algorithmically and manually. Not sure if those efforts are ongoing, but it could be another avenue to explore if you are interested.

I recently read that the digital scanning of shredded Stasi documents ran into some technical trouble;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/stasi-files-ea...

No shredder can match the document-eradicating power of an incinerator.

Interestingly enough, many documents have been recovered from Pompeii.

Quick history refresher: Pompeii was an ancient Roman city-town near Naples. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, Pompeii was covered in ~15 feet of lava and volcanic ash. One imagines that this was highly distressing to the residents of Pompeii, but none were available for comment as they were all busy being incinerated. I guess we'll never know how they really felt about it.

Then sometime in the 1900s a group of workers were excavating the area for a new project. They had been burning these odd little bits of coal they'd found. Imagine the horror when someone realized the "coal" was actually old manuscripts that had crumpled up into little balls of carbon due to the volcanic eruption. The workers had been burning priceless ancient Roman artifacts!

Researchers were able to mechanically separate some of the manuscripts, and with the aid of modern computer vision systems, we've been able to read some of them. It's quite an amazing story.

So I guess you probably want to spend the extra $20 and spring for the really good incinerator on Amazon. You don't want future historians literally digging through your incriminating financial documents.

During the Oakland Hills Fire[0] fragments of books and newspapers fell from the sky on us in Albany (north-east of Berkeley). Half- and quarter-pages.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991

It is incredibly easy to ensure that a controlled fire combusts all of its fuel completely. You just add excess oxygen to the combustion chamber.

Uncontrolled fires, and things burning under a blanket of ash, will not have sufficient oxygen in some places, will have CO as a reaction product instead of just CO2, and may leave unburnt carbon. Think about how charcoal is made--oxygen-free pyrolysis.

The waste product of a document incinerator is ash, water, and CO2. It is literally impossible to recover any information content from it.

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