[ExI] Alcor scandal

[Harvey Newstrom]

On Friday 02 October 2009 5:45:42 pm David Lubkin wrote:
> I was stunned to see this story. Does anyone know anyone who
> knows anything?
>
> <http://sports.espn.go.com/boston/mlb/news/story?id=4524957>

I will confirm here that Alcor did utilize my services to perform a forensics 
investigation on Larry Johnson's PC after he left their employ.  I won't get 
into any specifics about what Alcor had me look for and what I found.  But I 
will try to dispel some unfounded rumors floating around by assuring everyone 
that everything I found was completely boring.  There was no evidence of the 
horror stories we are hearing now.  There was no evidence of intrigue and 
subterfuge.  All these stories seem to have been created after the fact.

I was able to recover all his deleted emails and files.  Mr. Johnson kept 
everything until the end, and then deleted everything at one time, which was 
trivial to recover.  No sophisticated efforts were made to destroy files and 
hide files.  I was able to recreate his complete Internet activity history and 
local network activity, including his access history to Alcor networked files. 
 
They had an anti-virus program that scanned all files and logged a summary, so 
I could double-check the count of files I was recreating in the history with 
the logged number of files on the disk each week.  There were dozens of system 
logs that helped verify the timestamps and lack of any gaps in the recovered 
histories.  The internal structure of the Outlook mailbox helped verify that 
there were no missing emails that were not recovered.  It was one of the most 
straight-forward and complete forensics recoveries I had ever done.

And I found nothing interesting.

None of the day to day emails or reports to or from Mr. Johnson indicated  
problems with Alcor's treatment of patients.  None of the outrageous stories 
that appeared afterwards were mentioned beforehand.  There were not even hints 
or references to problems or concerns of any kind.  In fact, the reports were 
pretty positive about how well everything was going, and how much improvement 
was occurring due to Mr. Johnson's leadership.

I was able to read the history of Mr. Johnson's disputes with Alcor 
management.  They were concerning his own contractual relationship with Alcor 
and his expected future advancement within Alcor.  There were no disputes over 
patient care or Alcor's handing or patients.

I was also to recreate the history of Mr. Johnson's search for the attorneys 
in the Williams case, and his attempts at making first contact with them.  This 
indicates the at Mr. Johnson was not a mole into Alcor or secretly working 
against Alcor beforehand.  It also seemed to indicate that he became 
disgruntled first, and started looking for problems later.

There did seem to be a concerted effort to systematically go through all the 
networked disks and directories looking for files.  But the list of files 
accessed did not indicate any pattern or anything important.  If this indeed 
was a search for something bad, it doesn't appear that anything was found.

Everything I was able to uncover showed normal operations, no problems, and 
just the usual political disagreements that sometimes arise between employer 
and employee.  Based on the sheer amount of information and complete lack of 
any mention of problems or inappropriate behavior, it did not appear that any 
of these concerns existed before Mr. Johnson left Alcor.  All these stories 
seem to have been manufactured after the fact.

-- 
Harvey Newstrom <www.HarveyNewstrom.com>