I've seen the before-and-after when crap code was rewritten and refactored by hand by a good coder.

The improvement was huge.

Was it better than if the same coder wrote the code "from scratch" from the problem-description or design document? I don't know, but my point is that crap can be turned into gold by a good coder, and that refactoring can be part of the cleanup.

Good, now when my clients get hit by ransomware there is still hope that the "over-written" file can be recovered.

Well if you are going to charge the data center provider, you might as well go for everyone else who is merely providing a service. Find everyone who downloaded the material and charge their ISPs and their electric utility companies, because if the people weren't downloading underaged-p0rn they would presumably have a lower electric bill and would choose a cheaper plan from their ISP. Or so the logic goes.

Seriously, unless this business was specifically "in the business" of turning a blind eye to or even facilitating activity that reputable hosting companies don't do and providing services which have no practical value to legal businesses, then leave the hosting company alone.

For downloads of updates, yes, checksums and the like can and probably should be widely published. As others have said, having the checksums ONLY on the vendor's web site probably isn't any good but if they were "all over the web" they would essentially be tamper-proof.

Better than a checksum would be a cryptographicly signed by a public key that was issued by a major company that you trust already.

As far as the firmware that is on the drive:

Unless you have a way of directly reading the firmware memory without using the firmware itself, forget about it. Any attempt to ask compromised firmware to give you a data dump of itself would likely just get it to lie to you. Yes, there is probably equipment out there that can read the chips but you probably don't have it and you probably can't afford it unless you are doing it as a business or as part of a larger business (such as computer manufacturing, where you may want to validate that OEM drives contain the firmware that should be on them and not the ones that $SPYING_GOVERNMENT_AGENT installed).

As other replies have said, you are probably better off getting a lawyer BEFORE you go to the bank or anyone else.

Why?

1) If they've already discovered this themselves they may be working with the FBI and there may be a subpoena in your ISP's hands within minutes of you making your discovery.

2) Even if there isn't, the veiled threat of prosecution can be very intimidating.

3) By having your attorney speak to the bank and/or the government/police authorities for you BEFORE the police contact you, it will be abundantly clear to the police that you are just a good citizen and that it would be a political mess if they threatened to press charges or ignore the problem.

If someone in a high-security environment such as a a major sporting event wants to take your picture to run it through a face-matcher program, they are going to spend the money use* a camera which behaves like the human eye, ignoring frequencies outside of the range of human vision.

Basically, if you are still recognizable to a trained cop who has seen a good photo of you, someone can make a camera and computer that will recognize you with about as good an error rate as a trained cop.

*Or design one themselves, or pay someone to design one themselves.

Your point is well taken, but the Congressman and Senators who represent the people who live in and around Argonne are much more likely to have the informal political "pull" to get things done quickly without the need for formal action on Capitol Hill than other House and Senate members.

Other members to target would be those serving on or better yet those chairing the committees that do a lot of business related to Argonne.

Moon-bounce and ham-sats occur regularly enough to be useful. Granted, hamsat passes are so short-duration and so sought-after that they aren't useful for much more than bragging rights, and moon-bounce is too technically challenging to be useful for routine communications, but they are there.

RF-based repeater networks on the 2m (~146MHz) and 70cm (~440MHz) bands are common in the United States. They offer communications over hundreds of miles without using anything but the airwaves. Ditto some mountaintop- and very-high-tower-based repeaters. A single repeater that covers a 50-mile-or-more radius is more convenient and therefore frequently more useful in an emergency than an HF-based NVIS net (NVIS is a way of setting up your HF antenna for "short range" communications of about a few hundred miles or less. Unlike typical antenna setups, they do not have any "skip", which is very useful in an emergency).

In situations where the Internet infrastructure is still up (which is almost always except during emergencies, and frequently during emergencies as well), repeaters that link to the Internet can provide worldwide communication on any band.

Everyone in Illinois should write their US Senators requesting that Argonne invite other institutions to take over this project or at the very least become the custodian of existing data on the condition that it be maintained as a publicly-available resource.

Those in Illinois's 3rd Congressional District (where Argonne is) should also write their US House Representative.

I figured they would have had done this a long time ago, especially with security-related products.

On February 25, 2015, you wrote

Mother Nature and the National Weather Service just called to tell you it snowed in Texas today.

Pics, er, I mean, peer-reviewed study with independent confirmation of results or it didn't happen.

Ask her school if you can give a Last Lecture to them and, if you choose to put it online, to 6th-grade students everywhere.

As important as it might be to encourage her geek talents, instilling and encouraging humanitarian values is far more important.

Make sure she knows she is loved. If you are religious, ask your wife to keep making it a priority to encourage those values in your daughter.

Make sure she knows that human beings have value and should be respected and treated well, just as you and your wife have treated her well.

Encourage her to use her talents and interests to make the world a better place.