New Tapes of Another U.S. Massacre of Civilians About to be Released

[Plane]

<<Oh?

<<To the Army ,what would be the purpose of back up tapes?>>

The Army?  It's a vast bureaucracy, is it not?  I thought you were the expert on the bureaucracy, on its waste, its inefficiencies, its needless duplications.  Are you now telling me that the Army does not keep backup tapes?  I am shocked, plane.  Shocked.

Are you answering the question?

No there are not always duplicates of ugly secrets.

[Michael Tee]

Are you answering the question [to the Army ,what would be the purpose of back up tapes?]?

I thought the answer was implicit in my question, but in any event:  you make back-ups of everything "just in case."  It's more time and money wasted to figure out what to back up and what not to back up than just to back up the whole fucking mess, and if you need it, you've got it and if you don't need it, so what?  Besides, there seems to be some unwritten principle of office life, known to me from bitter experience, that just as soon as you decide you don't need a specific file or document, you find out just after it was shredded that you do need it after all.  Backing up is insurance against human error in deciding what should or shouldn't be backed up.

<<No there are not always duplicates of ugly secrets.>>

Since the Army was resisting Reuters' courtroom attempts to get the whole tape, right up to and past the time when WikiLeaks got what it showed, I think it's a safe bet that the Army has the whole thing all locked up safe and sound in multiple copies.

[Plane]

Are you answering the question [to the Army ,what would be the purpose of back up tapes?]?

I thought the answer was implicit in my question, but in any event:  you make back-ups of everything "just in case."  It's more time and money wasted to figure out what to back up and what not to back up than just to back up the whole fucking mess, and if you need it, you've got it and if you don't need it, so what?  Besides, there seems to be some unwritten principle of office life, known to me from bitter experience, that just as soon as you decide you don't need a specific file or document, you find out just after it was shredded that you do need it after all.  Backing up is insurance against human error in deciding what should or shouldn't be backed up.

<<No there are not always duplicates of ugly secrets.>>

Since the Army was resisting Reuters' courtroom attempts to get the whole tape, right up to and past the time when WikiLeaks got what it showed, I think it's a safe bet that the Army has the whole thing all locked up safe and sound in multiple copies.

I don't agree.

Even if there were a second copy , this leaker might have taken that too.

If the whole thing is timestamped anyone who had it could prove that they were releaseing the whole thing couldn't they?

Oh wait, did we decide that time stamps mean something or that they didn't? I loose track.

[Amianthus]

Oh wait, did we decide that time stamps mean something or that they didn't? I loose track.

Depends on the time stamp. Purely digital time stamps (like those contained in EXIF tags on images) can be manipulated easily, at will by anyone, and nearly impossible to detect. Those contained in this video, which includes an image of the time stamp as pictured in every frame of the video, are much more difficult to alter, and because of the type of compression used, trivially easy to determine if it's been altered (many people familiar with the techniques can spot these changes with the Mark I Eyeball).