I don’t know how you all have been spending your weekend, but mine’s been kind of busy. Between getting a haircut, rebuilding my hard drive, and those intermittent, rage-filled, computer-related screaming jags, I’ve been reading that Interpol report from the other day. And you know what’s weird about it? Fucking everything. For instance:
The Whole Point. Wasn’t the idea of the Interpol investigation to determine whether or not the files had been altered? The report says that there were no files created after March 3rd. Fine, but of course the laptops were obtained on March 1st, and in those two days Interpol reports “a total of 48,055 files for which the timestamps indicated that they had either been created, accessed, modified or deleted as a result of the direct access to the eight seized exhibits.” Forty-eight thousand. But other than that they were hardly touched at all!
The Sceevy Spokesman. Either Interpol’s Secretary General Ronald Noble never read his own report, or he’s a tool. While the report is peppered with, say, forty-eight thousand points of equivocation, homeboy was slightly less cautious, telling an AP reporter that "No one can ever question whether or not the Colombian government tampered with the seized FARC computers." Haha, is that a threat?
And while the Interpol report itself is clear that the source of the files is beyond the scope of the investigation (“The accuracy and source of the user files contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits are and always have been outside the scope of INTERPOL's computer forensic examination”), they are apparently not beyond the scope of this idiot’s ability to blah blah. His AP quote: “We are absolutely certain that the computer exhibits that our experts examined came from a FARC terrorist camp.” Absolutely, dingus.
A Question of Time. Among the weirder findings in all of Magic Laptopia is the discovery that FARC rebels were able to communicate…from the future. So while “no files” were created between March 3rd and today, they did find “2,110 files with creation dates ranging between 20 April 2009 to 27 August 2009,” and another “1,434 files which show as having been last modified between 5 April 2009 and 16 October 2010.” Of course, we all know that it’s impossible that the FARC were actually communicating from 2010, because President McCain will have blown up South America by then. What is possible is that the computers had screwy file dates, which means that nobody has any idea whether files were altered after March 3rd or not.
Even with all this, I still think my favorite part of the whole report (aside from the Interpol logo itself, which for some reason shows Mother Earth and the Scales of Justice being stabbed to death. Awesome.) is Section 77, where it explains that the laptop data could never actually be introduced “in a judicial proceeding,” because the files had been inappropriately accessed so many times that it would be impossible “to demonstrate or prove that the direct access did not have a material impact on the purpose for which the evidence is intended.” Wow, ya think?
