As Jesselyn Radack, author of The Canary in the Coalmine, demonstrated right before resigning, emails never really disappear. Or, at least, they don’t go quietly. But, what can we really get from subpoenaed media if there are no obvious backups? What if the data has been overwritten several times over?
from msnbc
“You can’t erase e-mails, not today,” Leahy said in an angry speech on the Senate floor. “They’ve gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there — they just don’t want to produce them. It’s like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes.”
As the messages hop around from server to server (through a series of pipes tubes) they’re going to leave a footprint. They’re going to end up on backup tapes. They’re certainly going to persist on the recipient’s device. And, they’re probably going to leave behind shadow data, even after being overwritten and overwritten (bad news for anyone out there really counting on their PC-purging overwrite tool). I haven’t heard enough talk about magnetic forensics, so
from How James Bond would wipe his hard drive
“People who know something about data destruction will be aware that overwriting data on a drive a number of times reduces the likelihood of it being recovered. However, Jorge explained that simply overwriting the bits does not erase tiny slivers of magnetic material between the bits, on the fringes of the readable areas. These slivers can contain what is called “shadow data”, which holds an echo of the information the drive once contained.”
NTI hosts a hefty article on the subject of shadow data. They writers call it The Fifth Dimension of Security Risk. I think there are two real take-aways from this article — when it really matters, it’s a pain in the ass to lose data, but one could. However, it’s one thing for the emails to have deleted or ‘lost.’ It’s another (read criminal) if they’ve been scrubbed.
Either way, I hear you can accidentally shadow erase if you hold this one button here with your foot, lean backwards, and hold down the Shdw-Del button with the tip of your nose. Considering what’s at stake, maybe that’s the case.
It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.
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