[ginger_beer]

Does anybody else wonder how an external hard drive could be mistaken as a speaker ? Seems quite improbable to me that police would remove the laptop but not the external hard drive attached to it. Also, once the owner died, how could the laptop continued to make backup of the files inside, enough for them to know that there was an 'attacker' who accessed those files? This suggests that there's some form of automatic backup script running in the background AND the laptop had been turned on throughout AND connected to the external hard drive. Up to the moment of 'recovery' by the police, who stupidly failed to notice this ?

Whenever we watch Holywood hacking movies, we couldn't help but notice the hilarious 'techie' scene. However, there shouldn't be such consistencies in this article because this is supposed to be based on reality.

[kevin_p]

There's a picture in the article - it's in a dock, almost vertical but leaning back at a slight angle, which makes it look a bit like a speaker. Direct link to the image: http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/bb2e144a-7653-11e2-8e...

[ginger_beer]

Ah I see. Yes it does resemble a speaker then. Was viewing the article from mobile, and all the images were stripped out. Still, several things in the article couls probably be attributed to the Singaporean police force's incompetence and not outright malice. Being corruption-free != being competent. The family didn't help either by withholding evidence. They should have created a mirror of the external drive, then handed the original to the police (instead of offering to do it the other way around).

[jessaustin]

The family didn't help either by withholding evidence. They should have created a mirror of the external drive, then handed the original to the police (instead of offering to do it the other way around).

This is ridiculous. The Todds lost their son. The police did a desultory job of investigating his death, and the family have the drive only because of how poorly the police secured the scene. On what planet do the Todds owe the police anything?

[ValentineC]

Randomly, I got curious on what drive it was, and it may have been a Seagate GoFlex Pro Ultraportable: http://www.seagate.com/sg/en/external-hard-drives/portable-h... (look under the Performance tab)

I'm not sure what powers the Singapore police may have, especially since the Todds may already be out of the country, but they certainly didn't have any problems persuading a filmmaker to turn over her phone, laptop and desktop for an investigation: http://spuddings.net/2013/02/07/mha-investigates-ex-bus-driv...

[jessaustin]

Haha, I had just assumed it was one of the thousands of no-brand devices available cheap at Sim Lim Square. It wouldn't be odd not to recognize a drive in whatever cheap plastic case was available: it might actually be a case molded originally for a speaker!

Thanks for the Spuddings link; that is fascinating. I especially appreciated the complaint about non-uniformed vs uniformed police. Due to a quirk of technology adoption around the time I lived in Singapore (i.e. everyone else was already on mobile phones), you could be reasonably certain that every Chinese man in his 40s-50s with sensible shoes and a pager on his belt was plainclothes police. It was amusing to watch them watching, and I can confirm the complaint that they paid more attention to Asian residents on labor visas than to anyone else. You would never see a clutch of skinny Indian guys walking around, without one of the plainclothes guys trailing them by twenty yards.

[evan_]

I have the exact same drive pictured, it is a "Seagate FreeAgent Go": http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-Portable-External-ST...

I've got it in black, it came with the dock pictured, and it actually looks quite a bit like a speaker when standing, because the lights at its base that indicate activity look like grille holes when they're dark.

[joewandy]

The alleged crime happened in a foreign and independent country, where they have no choice but to play by the rules of that country. That's why. Non-cooperation just makes it worse, ensuring that nothing at all gets done.

[jessaustin]

When in-country, Todd's followed the rules. They were in Singapore to collect their son's possessions, and they did that. This saved the Singapore police and/or the landlord from having to sell or throw away those possessions. If there were any way for them to do the police's job of investigating the incident, I'm sure they would have attempted that as well, since clearly the police abdicated that responsibility.

Now they're in the USA, and Singapore's rules no longer apply to them.

The police can do anything with a disk image they could have done with the original disk, except tamper with the evidence. If they still claim to require the original disk, that clearly demonstrates their intentions.