Matt Tiabbi and Glenn Greenwald Being Called Right Wing

@gol979 says [quote]so its all a lie? Nothing of import? And if so, how do you know?[/quote]
The legal issue is called "chain of custody," you can look it up. It means there's no way to establish which files on the drive are valid and which might have been placed there afterwards. It means there's a very strong reasonable doubt that any good lawyer can and will introduce. And every prosecutor knows that.

Continuing on the subject of the alleged "Hunter Biden laptop," copies of the hard drive were handed out to the media for analysis. Washington Post got one and passed it to two independent computer forensics experts. Below are some excerpts of their report, but let me just highlight one item: "... because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity."

That's right, someone deleted the operating system log files on the drive. Probably not Hunter Biden - he doesn't know enough. The absence of log files is terribly suspicious. It strongly suggests that files on the drive were modified by someone other than Hunter Biden, and then a crude attempt was made to hide the footprints. There goes your theory of the case. There goes your prosecution. Here comes the "Russian dirty tricks" narrative.

[sep][sep][sep][sep]

[sep][sep][sep][sep]

[b]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/[/b]
Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop
Washington Post
March 30, 2022

Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.

The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.

The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.

Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Hunter Biden properly reported income from business dealings.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

. . .

At The Post’s request, Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University security researcher who specializes in cryptography, and Jake Williams, a forensics expert and former National Security Agency operative who once hacked the computers of foreign adversaries, separately examined two copies The Post made of the portable drive Maxey provided.

. . .

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

. . .

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

. . .

Many questions about the drive remained impossible to answer definitively. That includes what happened during a nearly year-long period of apparent inactivity from September 2019 — about five months after Hunter Biden reportedly dropped off the laptop at the repair shop — until August 2020, when the presidential campaign involving his father was entering its final months.

Soon after that period of inactivity — and months after the laptop itself had been taken into FBI custody — three new folders were created on the drive. Dated Sept. 1 and 2, 2020, they bore the names “Desktop Documents,” “Biden Burisma” and “Hunter. Burisma Documents.”

. . .

Williams also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared.

[sep][sep][sep][sep]

[sep][sep][sep][sep]