Hard drives in WTC rubble?

sts60 said:
Our project was at a USAF base, with most of the development work going on at our contractor facility (I worked in the limited area and used our classified PCs and network). The entire building, bathrooms included, was at a higher clearance level. (Amusingly enough, though, when construction was completed but before data was put in there, USAF kindly had an open house and picnic for the contractor families. So the project itself was no secret.)
Click to expand...

Yes, there are frequently secure buildings on USAF bases with open storage up to SECRET level. I don't know of any facility where TS or above is openly stored.

I would guess most of the stuff in WTC 7 was no higher than Confidential/Eyes Only/No Foreign Dissemination, etc. Not real important stuff.

sts60 said:
Anyway, I didn't think it was possible for the lunacy of "WTC 7 was blown up to destroy documents" to be exceeded. But it has indeed been topped by the surreal "WTC 7 was blown up so that the documents could be removed."

Words fail me.
Click to expand...

Yes, the idea is right up there with the looniest of the loony, but somehow they always manage to exceed expectations!

There are so many asinine ideas it would be difficult for me to pick the most outrageous. There are plenty of them....
 
If you want to destroy hard drives:

Use this

The device runs off a standard 110V outlet, but if you are ever caught in a disk-destroying emergency and the power goes out, just bust out the optional $895 hand pump accessory and keep on crushin' in the dark.
Click to expand...

So even that 36hr power down wouldn't have been a hindrance.
 
Myriad said:
In the 70s there was this stuff called something like revealing fluid or disclosing fluid. Presumably it was some kind of suspension of very fine paramagnetic particles in a fast-evaporating liquid. You could brush it on a magnetic tape or disk surface, and the magnetic domains (the bits, as it were) would become visible.
Click to expand...

There was a product called "Mag-View", which was an aerosol can containing very fine particles of carbonyl iron suspended in a fast-drying fluorocarbon vehicle. When you sprayed it on a piece of recorded magnetic tape the track placement would become visible. If you recorded a tone and developed the tape with Mag-View you could even see the recorded waveform, like a lot of little bar magnets lined up next to each other, like this: ||||||||.

It was used in checking and adjusting head height, especially for digital reel-to-reel machines and was also used in editing 2" quad videotape. Since the head scans on quad were transverse rather than helical, developing the tape permitted the editor to place his razor blade cut in between two head scans.

Mag-View was off the market by the mid-'90s, but I think that there's someone making a similar product now.

defaultdotxbe said:
we did a similar experiment with out degausser, took a floppy and tapped it to the surface and lifted it back up as qickly as we can...unreadable (replicated in 20 out of 20 trials, lol)

we also dertermined it can erase a stack up to 4 floppies high

old tapes that have large metal plates get dangerously hot (havent figured out why)

and the thing produces a unique "burnt" smell that we have dubbed "baked data"
Click to expand...

The heating is probably due to the degausser inducing eddy currents in the metal plate, which cause resistive heating.

What a bulk eraser can do depends on the coercivity of the magnetic medium to be erased. Back when I worked at Sigma Sound we had a bulk eraser that could wipe a reel of 2" analog tape. I was once asked to see if it could be used to bulk erase RDAT tapes. After 5 minutes of rubbing the things right on the eraser's electromagnet core, I found that the tapes all played back just fine. There was a slight increase in the error rate, but it was nothing the player's error correction circuitry couldn't handle.
 
Reheat said:
Yes, hammers are really used to smash the platters. It's very efficient!
Click to expand...

Not good enough when I was in the Air Force working in the Minuteman Missile program. On rare occasions the D37 computer in the missile, which contained all the target information, would fail. One of the more sought after jobs was a temporary duty assignmeent for an officer to accompany the computer back to the AF's Heath Facility in Ohio, where he would witness the hard drive being extracted from the computer and dunked in an acid bath.
 
There are companies out there that offer serious hard drive disposal services for organizations worried about sensitive data (governments and major institutions, likes banks, have strict hard drive disposal policies). I'm not talking specialized sledgehammers or even a thorough wipe of the drive. I mean out-right shredding of the drive itself:

http://www.semshred.com/stuff/conte...147a81ff38/full/harddrive_destruction_big.jpg

http://www.semshred.com/content291.html

Destruction Rates:
1 to 25 Hard Drives = $7 per Drive, 26 to 100 Hard Drives = $5 per Drive, 101 to 250 Hard Drives = $4 per Drive, 251 to 500 Hard Drives = $3 per Drive, 500+ Hard Drives = Please Call for Pricing
DoD particle sizes are also available. Note: minimum destruction charge is $50.00
Click to expand...


If the government were trying to get rid of sensitive data, this sure seems like a far, far, far, far, far, far cheaper and much more subtle way of going about it...
 
Last edited:
I'm surprised that nobody has pointed out this obvious way to destroy a hard drive:<link>
 
Dave Rogers said:
It's called MaGZ-View. Sales slumped in early 2002 after users found out that you had to demolish the building before it would work properly.

Dave
Click to expand...

"are you tired of smashing your hard drives with hammers? fed up with endless acid baths and fluids. Why not use MaGZ-View. For just $45,000 we come and rig your whole building..yes your whole building and do the job simply and efficiently. No fuss, lots of mess.
MaGZ-View ..years of data gone in an instant!"

in a really fast postscript
please note service does not include retrieving the pieces from the rubble pile.
 
I think we've established that there was no discernible motive for going through so much trouble to destroy this building.

To any fence-sitters who might be lurking, this should throw the "prosecution's" case into serious question.
 
Last edited:
MaGZ said:
I have always maintained that WTC 7 was a controlled demolition–not to destroy information in the building–but to protect and retrieved the information on paper and hard drives. The building was pulled and a security perimeter was placed upon it by the National Guard. After search and rescue were completer for the area of the collapsed towers, WTC 7 was given priority for cleanup. In the past I have speculated the remains of WTC 7 was taken to a military base and the hard drives and remaining paper that was not burned in the fires were retrieved.

The CIA offices in WTC 7 were secondary facilities that targeted people who worked at the United Nations. The CIA station for New York City was at another location.
Click to expand...


I see. Blow up a building thereby scattering its contents in a random and uncontrolled manner over a sizeable area, not to forget a fair amount will be destroyed and hence be unrecoverable, then having to secure the area in order to collect the items, as opposed to securing (access to) the building and thereby keeping all those classified documents and hard drives contained within the offices they were in where they can be picked up by authorized personnel. Right.

I am sure NYPD would have cooperated with securing 7 WTC if the government has asked them to help protect information vital to the National Security (whether that was literally true or not). FDNY would have cooperated. Heck, even Silverstein would have cooperated and it was HIS building. Anybody doubt that?

Ok, I can think of at least one who would... :)
 
Here is a photo of one hard drive they were inspecting.

1363948246cf48966a.jpg
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom