From: karn@qualcomm.com (Phil Karn)
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 93 18:19:15 PDT
To: 76630.3577@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: Contempt of court
Message-ID: <9306240119.AA00543@servo>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 08:50 AM 6/17/93 CDT, Mike McNally wrote:
  In the days of
>yore, numbers runners and gangsters and nefarious bad guys would keep
>records on cellulose (?) flash paper which could be ignited and
>destroyed very rapidly should Elliot Ness be seen approaching the
>front door.

Nitrocellulose. Very popular before the development of cellulose acetate,
mylar and other modern polymers. It was the standard material used for
movie film stock, which explains the bunker-like construction of the
projection rooms in many older movie houses. Newer theaters often display
signs in their projection rooms saying "Safety film only". (Now you know
the meaning of the phrase "KODAK Safety Film" along the edges of your
print negatives.)

Today the main civilian use of nitrocellulose that I know of (other than
in smokeless gunpowder) is to make ping-pong balls. Try igniting one
sometime (in a safe area!)

>Another (simpler) suggestion made by a friend was to devise
>motion-sensitive devices which would cause total corruption of
>information stored on a disk if it were moved.

I've heard Gail Thackeray claim that hackers she'd raid would put big
electromagnets in doorways to erase magnetic media as it was being
seized. She never actually gave any proof of this, and it did always
seem just a little far-fetched given the relative ease with which a
hacker could just encrypt his/her incriminating data. I once asked her
what she'd do once the "bad guys" started encrypting, and she said
"I'm hoping you guys will tell us". (At the time I was one of the
so-called "good guys", working for Bellcore.)

Phil