Guys, you're missing the point. The scenario being discussed are the set of programs that collect large amounts of data, not about programs like Calc.exe or Apache that don't do anything like that. That's the whole point of asking whether data or code is of prime importance.

Banks are probably one of the few examples of very old COBOL code that's still running (although they've been trying to get rid of it for years), which is the exception that proves the rule. Regardless, if you approached bank executives and said, "we've compromised all of your systems and we're going to delete either all of your code or all of your data, you pick", which one do you seriously think they're going to pick?