Fucking Governmnent...

[DeistPaladin]

I have bad news for you, my friends: all those compromising photos and videos that once were on your digital device are still there today! When you thought you deleted them you didn't actually delete them, but you only trashed the 'headers' and icons of those files. The stuff you can see on your desktop. That's gone. But the files themselves are not. They are still there, and any software engineer can retrieve them, even years later!

So while you don't even know yourself that you have compromising material on your PC or other digital devices, you do IRL! And 'they' can nab you for it! Which is e.g. why TSA checks are so dangerous.

Still like your digital devices as much...?

Does formatting get rid of anything you've deleted?

[Minimalist]

Did you not read the article? He was trying to download music, and instead got child porn.

You would think that the download could be replicated, no? I don't see why it would take a year.

[Jaysyn]

Does formatting get rid of anything you've deleted?

It's still recoverable usually. Use something like DBAN instead.

[Rokcet Scientist]

I have bad news for you, my friends: all those compromising photos and videos that once were on your digital device are still there today! When you thought you deleted them you didn't actually delete them, but you only trashed the 'headers' and icons of those files. The stuff you can see on your desktop. That's gone. But the files themselves are not. They are still there, and any software engineer can retrieve them, even years later!

So while you don't even know yourself that you have compromising material on your PC or other digital devices, you do IRL! And 'they' can nab you for it! Which is e.g. why TSA checks are so dangerous.

Still like your digital devices as much...?

Does formatting get rid of anything you've deleted?

Not really. It just gets 'buried' a little deeper. So that those who want to go looking for it will have to apply some serious processing power on your HD to unearth it. But processing power is not really a problem for the acronyms. Basically, if data ever was on your HD, then it really still is, whatever you did to get rid of it.

The only real way I know of to destroy data is to physically smash harddisks to smithereens. So that's what I did with 'old' harddisks, the last 15 years. But not even that does it: remember the Columbia crash, at 2,500 mph? There was a 200MB HD on board that 'they' ultimately managed to rescue 85% of...

[Autumnlicious]

Not really. It just gets 'buried' a little deeper. So that those who want to go looking for it will have to apply some serious processing power on your HD to unearth it. But processing power is not really a problem for the acronyms. Basically, if data ever was on your HD, then it really still is, whatever you did to get rid of it.

Crap and falsehoods abound, egads Batman!

Software Developer/IT Admin speaking here. Recovering marked deleted (but not actually overwritten) data does not take 'processing power'. In fact, data recovery has absolutely nothing to do with 'processing power'.

Plain and simple, if you know how file systems work, it isn't a mystery how anyone, including the government, recovers data.

For example, deleting an object will usually just mark the disk regions occupied by said object as 'I am free. Overwrite me as you want'. So any new set of objects, like a movie, written to the same region on the disk will eradicate any information by rewriting the bits to match the new object's content.

So how secure deletion programs would operate would be to determine the block regions occupied by the offending files data and write data, random or not, to those areas several times to ensure that any fragment of a pattern from the previous file is gone. NSA standard, I think, is either 7 passes or 13. Can't remember which.

However, that's not the end of it.

Since a user frequently accesses files, holds partial files that are downloading, etc, a filesystem and the programs that interface with it (any program that manipulates files aka all of them), will cache copies in faster locations, temporary locations.

So one needs to identify the cache points and eradicate (secure delete) them too to remove the last bits of physical data.

But we're not out of the woods just yet.

Computer forensics often seizes networking equipment, etc because any device between you and the data original source (internet) may cache partially or fully the data that has been transmitted. Your ISP, for example, may keep logs of who and what you talk with. Most ISP's have the capability to inspecting data (so-called deep packet inspection) for illegal content, etc, so if some offensive material is fathomed on your end, the police/FBI may ask for your ISP's logs.

Remember, everything has a trail, of data, access times, ips, etc, and can be recovered to various degrees.

If you have stuff that is seriously illegal (computer wise), deleting ALL traces of offending data on ALL your devices is imperative. Making sure your gateways logs and caches are erased is also imperative.

And WHATEVER YOU DO -- DO NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION OF THE HUMAN ELEMENT (i.e. the police).

Why?

Because of what I've outlined with data caching and forensics retrieval, if you have the material on you, it can be probably shown that you (the user) are mostly indistinguishable from the pedophiles who download it (but are smart enough to erase it/hide it).

And what would a police officer be more likely to believe?

A child pornographer fan who tries to claim he isn't a CP fan and was 'set up' or average Joe who downloaded music but got naked kiddies?

The only real way I know of to destroy data is to physically smash harddisks to smithereens. So that's what I did with 'old' harddisks, the last 15 years. But not even that does it: remember the Columbia crash, at 2,500 mph? There was a 200MB HD on board that 'they' ultimately managed to rescue 85% of...

Which is why your safe bet is to first overwrite the data before you destroy it.

[Faith No More]

Does formatting get rid of anything you've deleted?

It's still recoverable usually. Use something like DBAN instead.

Giant magnets FTW.

[Doubting Thomas]

What Moros said. I used to use a program called Clean Disk Security which would, instead of just deleting the headers when you delete a file, would delete the actual file itself by overwriting the data on the disk. You could choose the level of security you wanted by choosing how many passes of random 1/0 bits it would make over the data.

Not that I am or ever was into kiddie porn, but I just figured that there's some information on a hard disk that doesn't ever need to be undeleted, like personal bank account info or what have you.

The trouble is that pedophiles are the new witch hunt these days. True, pedo's are sick people, but in our zeal to lock up pedo's many innocent people get accused. That's why if I ever found child porn accidentally loaded onto my computer, the last people I'd talk to would be the police.

Speaking of overwriting, would defragmenting your hard drive overwrite unused portions of the hard drive? I know it's not a guarantee to erase old files, but if you're rearranging space on your hard drive it should probably erase some of the old data.

[Tiberius]

I was going to write a response to the "data deletion" thing, but Synackaon pretty much nailed it.

[Doubting Thomas]

I guess if you really wanted to overwrite empty space on your hard drive, just start downloading a bunch of innocuous data, like say music, movies, or pictures, something which takes up a lot of space. Keep them in a throwaway folder, and just keep downloading a bunch more frivolous stuff. After you've downloaded several GB of crap, delete it. Of course there's no guarantee that the space you wanted to overwrite was overwritten, but after doing this for a while the chances of your deleted files being permanently deleted are greater. Plus, doing this after a HD defrag should help a bit, since the defragged data will overwrite some spots on the hard drive. Or, if you have a large program on a flash drive, simply copy it to your hard drive and delete it. I've got a program with a 4 GB installation file, and my nephew gave me 8GB of old DOS games. I'd think copying them to your hard drive a few times under different names would overwrite quite a bit of space.

Back in my Windows 3.11 days, my computer came with an undelete program. I liked to delete old files, then see how much data it'd take to overwrite them. Often just recording static from the radio as .wav files to the computer was enough to erase everything.

[Bgood]

What a moron for calling the police in the first place (esp. since he has a young daughter) He's probably some retard who downloaded the porn and then later felt guilty about it. Regardless, throw his ass in jail just for being an idiot anyway. lol

But I agree with RevJer's post. Private prisons making profits on arrests for corporations. Bad news. New World Order shit! War on Drugs..that's a scam. The government brings in drugs, such as heroin, from other countries we occupy, like Afghanistan, and then punish the citizens for using them. Classic create problem, resolve problem scheme. Fuck governments! 911 and 7/7 in Great Britain were inside jobs. So was Princess Diana's "accident".