Tuesday, December 11, 2007

The Company Tapes

Good point from Ned:
Besides the obvious, generally arrived-at conclusions in this business of the CIA "destroying videotapes" of torture, it strikes your correspondent that this story seems a trifle anachronistic...

The fact of the matter is, videotape that can be taken into the woods and burnt has been an outmoded technology since the mid-Nineties. It's true that digital recording media can be destroyed just as easily as a box of tapes, but surely -- surely -- an operation as technically sophisticated as The Company would make backups, and backups of backups, of any and all recordings. In 2007, it strains credulity to the breaking point to try to convince a Congressional committee that the record of an event that was recorded on digital video was destroyed utterly, without a chance of reconstruction.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm pretty sure the dog ate it.

Anonymous said...

I was wondering about this too...

CKR

helmut said...

I hear some CIA dude taped his wedding over it.

troutsky said...

I loved how Nixon erased 18 minutes like no one would notice.Some Kenny G would have been more inventive.

helmut said...

Better the obvious gap, I suppose, than exposing the actual content. When going for the lesser penalty and that lesser penalty is obstruction of justice, you know things are bad.

Rodger A. Payne said...

Back in '93, I taped an episode of "Baseball Tonight" over our firstborn's ultrasound video.

Mistakes were made.

MT said...

The backups presumably all were tapes or other hard medium as well. They might be available only for supervised viewing at Langley or loaned in some form that defeats or indicates any attempt to duplicate them. Just maybe a good point in general terms about copying, but not well articulated in the specifics, is my hunch.