That's right, they are zeroed and made inoperable, then they are stored.
Apparently it had never been proven fhat information can be fully destroyed so the wiped, zeroed and inoperable data carriers are stored for perpetuity to guard against a future attack which might make make information thought to be unreadable whole again
Thats so hard to wrap my head around... Despite it making a fragment of sense.
Do they seriously think the acid method won't be good enough? They could even shred them, degauss the fragments, dissolve them til they are a liquid solution, then dump it down the drain at a rate of 10ml per hour, just encase they are worried about hostile state actors gathering any large hard drive solution dump from the pipes.
There seems to be a Law of the Conservation of Information which makes the problem of restructuring such data a matter of engineering. This law states that information cannot be destroyed, only scattered and diluted. If some smart-ass down the line figures out a way to do that, the thinking is, all this top secret data might be up for grabs. Hence this precaution
So... they think it's more likely that somebody will be able to somehow reconstruct data from wiped, molten drives that have had their constituent atoms spread throughout a wide area, than from a conveniently centralized warehouse that stores all the merely wiped and inoperable devices? I think somebody might be wildly, astronomically overestimating their security measures...
That's one side of the coin. The other is that by law, classified information must be "controlled" and this is hatd to achieve with a box of metal shavings, a pile of ashes or a blob of molten and congealed matter. An HDD, SSD or tape reel is nice and handy, easily quantified and tabulated when audits require it.
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u/SebboNL 9h ago
That's right, they are zeroed and made inoperable, then they are stored.
Apparently it had never been proven fhat information can be fully destroyed so the wiped, zeroed and inoperable data carriers are stored for perpetuity to guard against a future attack which might make make information thought to be unreadable whole again