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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Is all material digital at this point? It reminds me of the “Argo” movie(that is supposed to be quite accurate) where the Iranians manage to reconstruct shredded documents that expose the identities of the persons of interest.

They also destroyed a device for encrypted communications. That part must be the easy part these days.

In a morbid way, I enjoyed these photos of “savages” capturing advanced military equipment: https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1426101381363027969...

It reminds me of Civ series where you could destroy advanced armies with large enough primitive ones. I used to dismiss it as unrealistic but apparently it wasn’t that unrealistic.

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It could also includes sensitive military equipment (e.g. night vision goggles) that will need to be destroyed.

It's 99.5% digital. They're mostly drilling holes in hard drives, not burning documents.

Edit: Of course "everything" is encrypted. You still destroy stuff anyway because of defense in depth.

how good is a hole on a platter. I suspect, some data can still be recoverable. A photograph with some parts missing is better than no photo.

depending how you're doing it, it's actually quite difficult to properly drill a hard drive.

I was never privy to the true details but I suspect that they are making good use of torx screwdrivers and abrasives (wire brush, sandpaper, etc) right about now. It's slower but they have a fairly good amount of time to deal with it.

If they have time they're wiping things first.

You can also just burn them. It's not the Taliban they're worried about, it's the Russian and Chinese spies who will sneak in and pocket stuff, but that's mostly dealt with with policies that keep the kind of info those people would want off of hard drives in an unrelated nation.

Is the substrate glass? Does it shatter when you drill the hole? If so, drilling might be fairly good.

It's a mix according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_platter

Bending is generally considered safer, as it prevents rotating the drive, making any recovery attempts prohibitively slow and expensive.

Most defense contractor infosec departments will accept video evidence of HDD destruction so long as they do a walk through showing serial numbers so they know which drives are accounted for.

As a result there's tons of videos that the public will never see of the world's heaviest presses, shears and brakes being used to decimate lines of hard drives. When you run a shipyard it's cheaper to just bend hard drives than it is to ship them back to HQ and have infosec deal with them.

One of my jobs as an intern was to take a list of serial numbers and watch the video walk-through and confirm the list matched the drives.

Destroying the encryption key for a harddrive takes less than a second. Are disks really not fully encrypted when they store sensitive information?

First you wipe the keys, then you wipe the drive... then you physically destroy it just to be sure.

I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a bulk eraser on site.

I'd assume that all the computers/hard drives have FDE on them, so wiping the headers/keys would suffice to make the entire disk unreadable.

Yup, anything sensitive should be encrypted but defense in depth is the name of the game.

Not an acceptable method of sanitation above certain classification levels, only physical destruction of the medium is sufficient.

There are shredders and V-shaped vice/press devices built for this purpose and such facilities will have them ready and waiting to be used.

Aircrafts are notoriously fickle. For a helicopter, I heard 4 hours maintenance / 1 hour of flight. There is about zero chance the Taliban have the personnel and parts to actually do something with them other than photo ops.

Even digital material exists in the physical world. Disk drives, flash memory and other storage hardware could still exist and must be destroyed to prevent capture by adversaries.

If these devices are encrypted, physical destruction is less of an imperative. There's no excuse for not encrypting all data at rest these days.

If allegations of Russian and Chinese support of the Taliban is true, it’s reasonable to be wary that foreign nation-state agents could acquire the hardware. Better to sabotage the hardware just in case they have the compute resources to break the encryption.

This sounds as if we don't really trust encryption, which makes one wonder, why then go into all this trouble and encrypt the data in the first place?

Because it still protects against certain threats. For example it could protect against the case where a laptop is stolen by a petty thief who didn’t realize the device had valuable intelligence.

Destroying the media is not strictly necessary.

It's a lot easier to instruct a rack of servers, or even a set of (centrally managed) desktop machines, to wipe itself than it is to physically destroy it, let alone the equivalent amount of information on paper.

Moreover, assuming encryption is in place, destroying the keys without touching the actual data is generally sufficient.

You will probably want to wipe the data then destroy the hardware as defense in depth, but in a dire emergency, taking the one thermite charge to the central key management server and its backup and cutting the power feed to the rest of the infrastructure is going to be good enough.

With human readable information on paper, you simply have no other option than physical destruction, which is an extremely slow and labor-intensive and manual process. Even with preparation, you can't really accelerate it much, whereas with digital information prepared for the possibility of needing emergency destruction, it's a matter of pushing a button and the data is gone less than a second later.

The flipside of that is that the worst crimes of a future surveillance state will likely stay hidden even after it gets toppled, unlike the East German Stasi that failed to destroy many of its documents in time.

Paperwork is likely burned in these situations, instead of shredded.

Although digital is replacing a lot of paperwork, many things are still printed these days.

Burning paper is surprisingly difficult to do at any noteworthy scale.

The NSA has a recipe for that: https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/decla... I really hope to see a video of it in action one day.

Gotta love the old style of writing where they prime you by explaining the underlying theory. These days technical documents like this (both government and private industry) just say "do X because we said so, trust us".

>if the drum is tipped over at this point, a greenish liquid slag flows out. This quickly hardens to a cement-like mass.

Knocking the drum over with the forklift was probably the highlight of that private's month.

I particularly like the humor that seems to be universally woven into older NSA documents. I can see why people would want to work there, if you have no moral issues with the nature of the job, it must be (have been?) an interesting, challenging job in a pretty good environment.

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