Fucking Governmnent...

[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...