I can't figure out why the government just doesn't remove the hard drives and send them to a shredder. Even a private individual can achieve roughly the same level of security with a drill and a 1/2" drill bit. With the price of drives being what they are now it can't impact very much the resale value of the computer to sell it without a drive installed.

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Monty J. Harder <mjharder@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:
The government standard is a medium security level application that specifies overwriting a hard drive six times through three iterations. Each iteration consists of two write-passes on a hard drive. The first iteration removes the files over at the drive surface, while the second iteration registers "zeros" on the surface.

What the hell does that even mean?

"removes the files over at the drive surface"

It sounds like they say to write six times to the drive, with the even-numbered writes being 0s. I suggested twice that. So what do they recommend writing on the odd-numbered passes if not (pseudo)random junk?