One more reason not to get drunk and xerox your ass on the office copier:

[captainsblog]

From this past week's Artvoice:

You’ve certainly heard by now about the CBS Evening News report on digital photocopier hard drives: CBS reporters purchased some used photocopiers out of a warehouse in New Jersey and removed their internal hard drives, which retain copies of every image ever scanned on the machines. (The hard drives for most photocopiers and scanners built since 2002 contain such hard drives.) One of the photocopiers, a Toshiba, had been leased by the City of Buffalo for the Buffalo Police Department, where it was used by the Sex Crimes  and Narcotics units. CBS News discovered that the hard drive had not been erased when the city’s lease had expired and the machines were returned. In fact, the hard drive contained all kinds of sensitive information, according to CBS News: “…from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.”

Other machines obtained by CBS News from the same New Jersey warehouse offered up private medical records, copies of pay stubs, employee addresses, and Social Security numbers.

The story, which aired on April 15, caused quite a stir in Buffalo’s City Hall. Mayor Byron Brown instructed the city’s law department to look into the terms of the leases with Toshiba Business Solutions, which rented the machines to the city, and to identify all the machines leased under that particular agreement. Council President Dave Franczyk wondered whether the vendor had informed the city that the machine contained these hard drives. The mayor’s spokesman, Peter Cutler, apparently told the Buffalo News on Wednesday that the city did not know: “Cutler reiterated the city’s position Tuesday that Buffalo officials had no knowledge that confidential information was being retained on the hard drives of the copiers.”

But two sources—both requesting anonymity, since no one in the Brown administration is allowed to speak to the press without express permission from the mayor’s office—have told Artvoice that the city should have known about the existence and function of the hard drives. These sources say that Toshiba Business Solutions offered to scrub the hard drives clean of data as part of the lease contract, for an additional fee. Whoever negotiated the contract for the city, the sources say, declined the scrubbing service and its additional cost.

Cutler would not comment on that allegation, saying he did not see any profit in addressing “innuendo.”

Maybe Cutler's ass is one of the ones which has a picture of it innuendo.

Badum ching.

But seriously, folks. I hadn't heard this story, nor had it ever occurred to me that copy machines are yet another doodad I've got to get all ethically worried about. Now I'm sure a whole market is going to blossom up, between sleazy lawyers bring class actions against law firms for disclosing confidential information at the end of copier leases, to aftermarket purchasers blackmailing, urrrr, offering premium-priced cleaning services to firms who never even knew this was an issue.

Because lawyers don't deal with this sort of shit- that's what secretaries are for. 

Put down the jagged beer bottle, Kristen- that's not me talking. But it was at least one older lawyer I've worked with this century, who practically pitched a shitfit about having to assist in the process of selecting a new copier when we expanded our offices. Naturally, he would go on to be one of the first people to bitch when the copier was actually broken, but the day-in-day-out details of things like features (and frivolous details like the cost to scrub all of his pr0n off the copier hard disk) were clearly beneath him.

Yet another benefit to the fact that I work mostly alone now- and almost exclusively with technology products I selected, purchased and learned to use entirely by myself.

Comments

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Well, crap. Can we erase the hard drives ourselves? In retrospect it's pretty clear my office Minolta with its ability to recall jobs and do them again must be saving that data _somehow_, but I hadn't really thought about this! Crapola.

[whyaduck.livejournal.com]

I don't know about all copiers since 2002.

Ours at work are authorized for copying classified (within reason) work and all you have to do afterwards is chut it down for 30 seconds to clear the memory. I'm sure if there was a hard drive in them it would've been noticed.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I showed the article to our office manager today. Ours was intentionally set to "off" for exactly this reason.

She also heard another part of the story where the refurbished copiers didn't just have all the dishable dirt on the hard drive; one of them had a confidential attorney letter left ON THE FREAKIN GLASS when they removed, shrink-wrapped and resold the machine itself.

[bluesilverkdg.livejournal.com]

I enjoy Xeroxing my face all contorted like. I'm going for something akin to my userpic.