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How much more suspicious activity and lucky coincidences would there need to be to convince you (if you're a current denier) that Epstein was murdered/"allowed" to kill himself?
Because from what I see there's a lot of weird things already. The cameras for in front of his cell are down, guards apparently failed to check in on him (apparently both of them fell asleep despite this being their job), his roommate he's supposed to have for suicide watch is moved out earlier that day without replacement, and two staff members get accused of falsifying records only for the charges to get dropped silently two years after over new years.
Now the one camera that was working has footage released from it only for it to be likely edited video that doesn't even provide a meaningful perspective even if it wasn't edited (so why is it changed and had parts removed? Was something incidentally caught on one of the cameras they didn't shut down?) and a full minute missing along with the other smaller possible cuts, a cut that was completely unmentioned in the inspector general's report but suddenly shows up now. With an excuse that the "missing minute" is a standard reset and the recordings aren't operating at that time yet it now appears to exist according to government leakers.
That same day Epstein was also allowed to make an unmonitored call on a line intended for attorneys only to a non-attorney, with the regional director saying "We don't know what happened on that phone. It could have potentially lead to the incident, but we don't - we will never know" which is another oddity. He claimed he was calling his mother ... his mother has been dead almost two decades before then.
Then afterwards, Epstein's own lawyers contested the official finding and hired their own pathologist who said the injuries were more indicative of homicide by strangulation than normal self hanging.
Then of course we have things like Epstein's sweetheart deal maker Alex Acosta being a literal high level member of the government stepping down only a month before the suicide. Was he distancing himself? Cause that's a mighty odd coincidence too to leave right around that time.
And we get told all sorts of things about having files ready for release, only for them to apparently not actually exist like all the files sitting on Pam Bondi's desk. We have leaks of multiple high level politicians (including the current president refusing to release the records who also resigned over the federal government when Epstein died and hired Acosta earlier) with close connections to him. We have intelligence operatives and high level officials trying hard both directly and indirectly as anonymous sources to deny accusations he was working for them which many powerful people are trying to tout as evidence. Which fair, I expect them to deny if it's not true. But also I expect them to lie if it is true.
Like oh really spy agencies, half your job is to be skilled liars and we're just supposed to take your word for it. People can't be this lacking in self-awareness right? So why do so many of the powerful people with connections to Epstein apparently lack this understanding and think it's compelling counter evidence by itself?
Like obviously none of these things in their own are proof by themselves. If they were, we wouldn't be having a discussion like this we would just say "look at the 100% proof it happened". But a lot of truthful things don't have 100% proof. I'm pretty sure OJ Simpson is a murderer despite not having seen it myself and him being found not guilty. I'm pretty sure Casey Anthony killed her daughter. There's a really strong likelihood Micheal Jackson molested some children. Carole Baskin (although a bit weaker of a suspicion) might have been involved in the disappearance of her husband. None of these have hard conclusive evidence, yet none of these are odd to believe.
And just like those examples, there's a whole lot of weird oddities and coincidences and suspicious behavior around Epstein, his death, and the information on him and his connections that it seems pretty reasonable to suspect his supposed suicide wasn't entirely legit. Outside of 100% proof, how much more would be needed before it stops being "just a conspiracy theory"?
I don't have a dog in this fight but this doesn't unsettle me at all.
So. I had a job once that required keeping clocks in sync between all of the computers in a company. For servers we decided clocks could drift only one millisecond, but for desktops we allowed up to 100ms. This required modifications to Windows because Microsoft only imposed one minute clock discipline at the time (only improving on this policy after 2016, which is probably not early enough for whatever piece of shit the jail installed). That means Microsoft allowed Windows computers to be up to one minute off of the real time, which in practice meant any two computers could be almost two minutes apart in their timestamping (e,g, one was a minute slow and one was a minute fast).
You may think computers should be able to keep time without trouble, but nothing can be further from the truth. They suck at it, due to interesting physical properties[1]. They can be slow or fast, and it can vary over the course of the day. Sometimes the drift adds up to tens of minutes a day. Without any correction they drift and drift and could be days or weeks off from the actual current time. It's ugly. The way they correct for this is by coming up with a clever protocol that pings well known atomic clocks over the internet. Though modern solutions can also recruit GPS.[2]
Anyway, watching the time jump forward by a minute on a recording system doesn't strike me as that odd. Especially when it's around midnight, which is when people schedule automated tasks, like "stop writing to 2019-08-09.mov and start writing 2019-08-10.mov", to me this is not at all suspicious.
I don't know for a fact that this is what happened, of course. And I certainly don't know how jailhouse surveillance systems work. But I have had to explain in legal matters why recordings in networked computer systems can have such variation in timestamps. People crinkle their eyebrows when one networked system says this thing precedes this other thing, even though the event with the later timestamp caused the event with the earlier timestamp, use but it's generally the sad truth.
Anyway, I'm open to believing he was murdered. But you're going to have to wake me up when the missing minute is revealed and it shows masked people holding stun guns hopping over the railing. A one-ish minute forward jump in a recording at midnight just doesn't phase this systems engineer at all.
(I'm not going to evaluate the claim that the missing minute exists because anonymous sources may as well be epistemic status: complete fabrication at this point. But also I'd rather not try to imagine how incredibly stupid a jailhouse surveillance system could be)
Basically, computers are made of metal and metal expands and contracts as it heats and cools. Since temperatures around computers and inside of them vary all of the time (especially based on workload) this causes its own internal timekeeping to drift from real time as the distance electricity has to travel varies based on temperature. This varies the number of cycles that happen per second.
It's also not as easy as just check the atomic clock time and set your computer's time to that one. If you find your computer's time is too fast (minutes ahead of real time), you can't fix it by just slamming the clock backwards in time. That fucks a lot of applications up. So they come up with this thing called "slewing", which basically is an adjustment to the computer to count perceived ticks of a clock as less than whole ticks so it catches up. Some time keeping policies will also slew speedup adjustments if the clock is behind, but it's less destructive to application logic to make the clock jump forward, so you see that from time to time in logs as well. E.g. a one minute jump forward is safe, though it makes people crinkle eyebrows if it's in a timestamped video.
Prisons use commercial grade CCTV systems with multiple redundancies (eg recording backup), alerts for camera or recorder failure, strict maintenance contracts for callout (within x hours; say within 24 hours) and more. Commercial grade Network Video Recorders are dedicated pieces of equipment that include NTP compatibility and high quality internal crystal oscillators for internal timekeeping. Clock fidelity should be tested during the commissioning and maintenance process. The dual recording servers can be setup on 12 hour (or even 13 hour) loops that overlap (eg Server A starts its recording loop at 00:00am and Server B starts its recording loop at 06:00am) preventing 'missing minutes'.
All that said, some systems and technicians are better than others.
tldr; the systems used are designed knowing that one of their major purposes is to provide post-incident forensics and serve as evidence in a court of law.
It's another unlikely coincidence in a string of coincidences.
Thanks for the insight. I'm still cynical enough to believe this is what's advertised on the tin and not stuff that means any of it works well, especially when administered by the human capital involved in prisons.
The fact that it slams at the one minute around midnight is a strong Bayesian update towards system error.
I'm giving allowance for the fact that what's on the tin isn't always what is installed or maintained. My main point is that it is likely that failures in a 'just so' way of the electronic security systems is possible, but unlikely.
Somewhat tangentially, I can't find any evidence that anyone involved in prisons has ever been fired or disciplined for recording issues alone.
On the other hand, major Wall Street firms are routinely disciplined for record keeping failures even if there's no case of fraud or other misconduct being examined.
To me that means shitty record keeping in prisons is actually the norm while on Wall Street it's something firms are constantly anxious about fucking up.
For politically high profile cases I would expect someone, somewhere inside or outside of the prison system would have had a quiet word and said 'this person is important, don't fuck this up'. For all of these unlikely cascading failures to happen? It's very suspicious.
What I'm also saying is that there should be logs kept as standard in western countries for high grade security systems and the whole 'whoopsies everything just happened to not work' doesn't fly. Even making allowance for podunk bad installations, operations and oversight.
Have you never seen a cascading failure caused this way? You see a potentially-serious problem, so you rush to fix it before it bites someone, and whoops, your rushed fix to the problem nobody had encountered yet breaks something else that people continuously rely on. If you're well-prepared then your "fix" just gets caught in testing, but I've never heard of a security installation with two independent redundant camera systems for testing purposes.
It's as simple as giving a briefing and saying 'give extra attention here' in a daily briefing. It's not 'lets change everything'.
They should have said 'who is Epstein bunking with? Is that the right guy? Why don't we put him in with a known element rather than Bubba-three-kills?'
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My bias goes the other way I guess. I've seen so much shit fail at its one fucking job I'm hardly surprised anymore.
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My friend, that's what the sales guy said. And by the way he's the cousin-in-law of the prison super.
Without access to the specification, contracts, logs and maintenance records, there is no real way to know.
Sure. I just think there is far more incompetence at government contractors than your initial post let on.
Yes, you're right there. I've seen it myself.
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