LAW AND ORDER: ACCESS NATION

WHICH IS REAL AND WHICH IS FICTITIOUS?

In the Access Nation episode of Law and Order’s Season 12, Detectives Briscoe and Green were investigating the murder of a psychologist named Tracy Conley.

Through investigation, they found that the murder may be linked to one of Tracy’s patients. Her client, a former rapist, asked for the aid of a to computer company to alter some information about him on Tracy’s computer.

With the help of the same computer company which sells information, the patient was also able to access Tracy’s private information

Now, let’s see which of the programs mentioned in the episode are real and which are purely fictional.

First, is it possible to recover files which have been modified recently?

The answer is yes, it possible and fairly easy. For Microsoft Word, specifically, you just have to follow a few steps. If the file was made in software other than Word and Excel, but is running on Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, these versions have System Restore Tools which saves version information of your files. Aside from these, there is also available recovery software from the market like Recuva and RecoverMyFiles. which recovers files which were accidentally deleted or modified.

Second, does your computer really leave copies of deleted files in the hard drive?

Yes. When we delete a file from our computer, even after removing it from the Recycle Bin, it continues to exist on your hard drive. This helps us recover our deleted files and as demonstrated in Access Nation, it may help other people recover our confidential files.

Third, is there a worm that can make someone else take over your PC and see everything you type, keystroke per keystroke?

No. What worms basically do is copy itself from machine to machine. This makes your computer go slow because it takes up network bandwidth and computer processing time when they replicate. They may do considerable amount of damage but worms generally don’t alter files in your computer.

Fourth, is it possible to track banking transactions through computers?

Since the rise of the internet, banking transactions online has been made possible. All you need is connection to the internet and some account details and when you do payments or withdrawals or any transactions online, you would be provided with a transaction number from the bank or the transfer service enabling you to track your transactions.

And lastly, is there really information gathering software that can gather confidential information?

Just by searching the web and typing “information gathering software” we can see that there are quite a few of these software that claim to gather confidential information like the Software agent-mediated confidential information gathering system.  

There has also been a report about cookies that gather personal details much like what the worm was said to be capable of in the episode Access Nation.