If the Obama administration is correct, what will the ground evidence show? The distribution of debris, once fully catalogued, would confirm a violent sudden explosion, as opposed to a long trail of parts indicating a slow breaking apart and would include missile shrapnel. It would also show that the radar-guided missile likely exploded within about 65 feet from the target. Infrared imaging might show explosive residue somewhat evenly distributed on the bottom of the plane. Conversely, an excessive amount of explosive residue on the engines could indicate that the missile was heat seeking and not shot from an SA-11 and that the U.S. was wrong.

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How hard is it to hack a black box? According to technical experts familiar with their design who spoke to Defense One, the answer is not very. Modern-day flight data recorders use solid state drives, SSDs, to store information. Unlike the hard drive in most PCs, SSDs consist of a bunch of memory flash drives stacked on top of one another. They store memory with no moving parts so they are considered far more rugged than conventional hard drives. This is why engineers began using them on planes.

Ironically, SSDs may actually be more hackable than the conventional hard drives they replaced. When you overwrite a file on an SSD, you don’t leave the same clear record that you do when you delete a file on your computer. In fact, some members of the computer forensics community have sounded the alarm about the growing popularity of SSDs and the trouble they could cause in terms of evidence discovery and retention in the future. Graeme Bell and Richard Boddington of the University of Murdoch in Australia even went so far as to opine that “it seems possible that the golden age for forensic recovery and analysis of deleted data and deleted metadata may now be ending” because of SSDs.

In the case of MH17, the boxes aren’t likely to provide much new information. Forensics teams use them to determine the mechanical or human cause of a crash. But recovering the boxes could be useful in this case to categorically rule out pilot error or mechanical malfunction. If the data on the boxes does in fact suggest that something else happened to the plane, that development would no doubt fuel the conspiracy theories that have already taken route across the Internet, which could play to Russia’s advantage.

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