Physical destruction of a laptop hard drive

Tonight I spent some time destroying two hard drives for an old laptop that I no longer use. Both were hard disk drives. I had previously backed up the data on the hard drives, and then wiped the drives, but I wanted to take the additional step of making whatever remained on them physically impossible to access.

After wiping the drives, I tried to recover data from them using recovery tools included with the Hiren BootCD (see here), just to confirm the wiping software had been effective.

The first step was to remove the battery, so any chance of an electric shock could be eliminated. Next using a precision screwdriver, I removed the covers for the two drives in the laptop, which were both secured inside with metal braces, which also had to be removed.

The drives each had a controller board on one side, and a metal plate on the opposite side.

I did not have the right tools to unscrew the metal plate, so I drilled through each drive from the side with the controller board.

Drilling one hole took several minutes with a no-frills Black & Decker drill. While I managed to put two deep holes in each drive, I was not able to penetrate past the metal plate case on the opposite side.

A lot of people make the mistake of ending their effort to physically destroy a drive at this point. However, it is possible for the platters in the HDDs to still be intact after holes like these have been drilled. See for example this video posted by @cfldriven in which he demonstrates how drives with large drill holes . . .

. . . still have platters from which data can be recovered:

I couldn't pry off the metal plate to reveal the platters on my drives, but I was able to open up the holes I drilled further with a screwdriver and confirm that the platters had been smashed.

It was possible to hear the pieces rattling around inside, and several small broken shards spilled out of the case.

Of course, the more common solid state drives used in most laptops manufactured in recent years don't have platters, and drilling several holes in them may leave some of the chips on which they store data undamaged.

Javascript to redact highlighted text in Adobe Acrobat

If you have a set of PDFs which attorneys have highlighted to show which excerpts in the documents they want to be redacted, you can run a Javascript in Adobe Acrobat to convert the highlighted text to redactions.

Follow these steps:

1. In Acrobat, under Tools, open the 'Action Wizard'.

2. Select 'New Action'

   
   

   

. . . and then add the 'Execute JavaScript' tool. Be sure to uncheck 'Prompt User'

3. Click on 'Specify Settings' and then add the below script into the Editor:

this.syncAnnotScan();

var annots = this.getAnnots();

if (annots != null) {

    for (var i in annots) {

        var annot = annots[i];

        if (annot.type == "Highlight") {

                                    annot.type = "Redact";

                                    annot.fillColor = color.black

                        }

    }

}

this.applyRedactions();

4. Next, add a command in the action to save the file.

5. Under the Save settings, enter a suffix for the new file that will be saved:

   

   
   

6. Name and save the new action:

6. When you run the action

. . . it will prompt you to select multiple files

This script will redact highlighting of different colors - not just yellow, but pink, blue, green, or whatever color has been used.

Note that if other text in the PDF has been marked for redaction:

. . . this script will apply those redactions.

Analyzing Excel Data and Preparing Chronologies with Copilot

These days it's widely appreciated not only among litigation support professionals, but also among attorneys and law firm employees in general, that generative AI can quickly and reliably perform many common tasks such as document review or document summarization which previously would have taken many hours to complete.

Here's a demonstration of just how easy it is to use Microsoft's Copilot AI to review data in an Excel file, and the content of a set of PDFs.

This is a .csv file containing baseball batting statistics from 1871 to 2023, which can be downloaded here.

If you simply upload the file to copilot and ask a general question, it can give you an accurate example. In this example, you can see that I have asked about the number of home runs hit by players for the New York Mets, but I have not specified the abbreviation used for this team ("NYN"), or the abbreviation used for a home run ("HR") used in the .csv file.

. . . and yet still copilot gives me accurate results. Note that it uses the abbreviations for player names used in the Batting.csv source file - so it's not getting the information from a general knowledge set.

It can also easily generate a visualization of the search results like this bar graph:

. . . and will upon request modify the chart to show the data according to a different metric.

Copilot may be very literal in interrupting the instructions you give it. Here when I asked for a list of players hitting higher than .400 in a season it included players with very few at bats.

. . .however it prompted me to give more specific instructions. Keep in mind that batting averages are not actually listed in the source data - copilot knows to perform the calculation by dividing the number of hits by the number of at bats.

Copilot also gives you the option to export the results from any operation it performs:

You will get your own Excel file to work with.

I also tested how copilot performed analyzing multiple document PDFs using trial exhibits from the Enron litigation which are available on the DOJ's web site: https://www.justice.gov/archive/index-enron.html

Copilot did not do a good job OCRing the PDFs - the supposedly text-searchable PDFs that it generated were actually files with blank pages.

The free version of copilot will only allow you to upload 3 files at once.

When I asked it to tell me the dates of three PDFs - each of a different document type - it not only gave me the correct dates, but also provided an accurate summary of each document without being asked to.

Note how for the PDF named, 'EXH063-00292.pdf' it's able to correctly identify the author and the pinpoint purpose of the letter.