Reply #12: LINK

[troubledamerican]

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1293/61/

Quote:

"Some analysts have raised doubts about Interpol’s conclusions. Three professors of information technology at the Polytechnic University of Ecuador, led by Deacon Carlos Montenegro, held a press conference today criticizing the Interpol report.

The professors emphasized the report did not prove much at all, given the limited scope of the investigation and said Interpol’s face-value acceptance of the devices as FARC property was a contradiction of the report’s own findings. They not only criticized the scope of the report, but also the conclusions of its technical findings.

They seized on the agency’s methodology, which only examined images of the hard drives’ user files handed over by Colombia, and not the hard drives themselves. They demonstrated to a crowd of reporters how easy it is to change the creation and modification dates on documents. They asserted these changes would only leave digital traces on the actual hard drives, which have remained in Colombian custody. Investigators would need access to the actual hard drives and the system files to determine whether and when modifications occurred, according to the Ecuadorian analysts.

The Ecuadorian professors also pointed out that Interpol has no way of determining whether Colombian officials modified, deleted, or created documents between March 1 and 3, as the report contends. In fact, by the Colombian government’s own admission, its handling of the computer devices during those days did not conform to internationally recognized standards on the chain of custody when dealing with forensic evidence. Interpol’s contention that the devices were not modified is based on nothing more than faith in Colombia’s sincerity, argued the professors."