Fucking Governmnent...

[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.