Re: POISON PILL

[doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)]

nate@VIS.ColoState.EDU (CVL staff member Nate Sammons) said:
>Well, as far as I know, it's hard to recover much of anything
>if the bomb is a Thermite one....  they seem to do lots-o-damage
>to metallic objects... and, OK, FBI agents.

Yeah, I guess thermite would be better than a shock wave bomb in some ways.
I could believe that, with sufficiently careful attention to detail, it might
be able to heat 100% of the magnetic material beyond the medium's Curie point
and therefore beyond all recovery. If on the other hand the thermite were
simply tucked next to the drive...well, it's amazing what forensic
investigators sometimes recover from things intended to be destroyed
by thermite. A lot can go wrong in real world situations.

>possibly a strong EMP?

Conceivably. I'm unclear about the effects of EMP on magnetic media.
Also, really good EMP requires fairly powerful shaped charges. Perhaps
a simple degaussing coil would do the trick. Not sure. Seems like it should.
Do any modern hard drives attempt magnetic shielding in their cases?

Now that prices on recordable CD ROM drives are down to $4K, personal
CDROM archiving will become more and more common; thermite would be
handy there, too, again assuming very careful design & placement.

This little discussion is all just for the fun of it from my point of view; I
agree with other comments here that leaving your data encrypted is more to
the point, not to mention far more reliable than just about any other
trick.
	Doug