a miracle - tv show gets tech right
i was truly amazed as i watched law & order last night...(prob a rerun but i never watch tv...)
it was a show dealing with privacy, computers, data mining, trojans, keyloggers, password cracking, online stalking, data retrieval and computer forensics...and they got it about 95% right...
premise was this...woman therapist killed, family gives laptop to police...they take it to computer forensic speacialist, case files are pwd protected which are cracked (not in 5 minutes...and not by typing crack this password...swordfish anyone)...case files show one edit dated after the murder...but no sign of b&e at victims...forensics finds a keylogger an trojan...which they called a worm...which was speculated to have been sent to the victim by the murderer as an email attachment...so he had all the pwds and all of her personal info...they were able to recover an unaltered copy of the case file from the hd and "make the collar"
turns out murderer was a parolee who had been convicted of rape and was seeing therapist as part of release...he had paid a data mining co to dig up everything about her...they found some chat room archives of a rape victim support group as she had been raped when she was younger...she had been told by the company he was working for that he had been caught dl'ing pron which violated his parole...he felt that she was going to turn him in because she was betraying him because she was a rape victim counselling him...so he killed her...
case went to court...there were problems with the seizure of the laptop and the confidential case files... as they often do on the show, they made the case bigger by charging the head of the data mining co as an accessory to murder. his defense was they were just collecting already available information and selling to anyone...they also threw in the fact that his defense lawyer had illegally counselled to not ask the data mining clients if they had criminal backgrounds...all of this by hiring a rival data mining co to dig up dirt and old email records on the defendant and his lawyer...
normally when shows/movies start spouting techspeak i have to leave the room...(swordfish anyone...)...i just can't stand it...nobody in my house will watch a tech movie with me anymore... ;) but someone really did their homework on this episode...
the only thing they messed up with was calling a trojan a worm...and that 's not a huge thing since they at least got the delivery mechanism right...
i was so impressed i may even look up the writer of the episode and send him an email...it is so very very rare...
