Re: [ME] Re: Crippled US EP-3

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> [I'd defy anyone to read data of drives that had be
> demagnatised, hit with a hammer wielded by a cheerful
> person and then burned.]

Scanning electron microscopy can do wonders.  You'd be amazed what they can
recover nowadays.

Surprisingly enough, the hammer blows do almost nothing to destroy the data.
Just destroys the fine machinery required to be able to use the drive in the
normal fashion, but the data is still there.  Bulk degaussing is useful, but
not guaranteed; how many passes?  At what strength of field?  Etc.  Every
year the techies are able to recover more and more data that was exposed to
stronger and stronger fields for longer and longer periods; what suffices
today may not tomorrow.

In the end, the only way we know to physically destroy digital information
is to raise the temperature past the Curie point.  Barring that, it's widely
suspected that melting the media the iron oxides are on will work, too--if
all you have is a soup of 1s and 0s, it's a hard task to reassemble the
original order out of it.

Last time I had to destroy a drive was in '94.  They only required a DoD
wipe on it, but I wasn't quite satisfied--I wiped it, then encased it in
concrete in a small dustbin.  Kept it around as a memento and endtable.