Lake Superior Sounder Article
“The truth is: Disc data isn’t really destroyed till flakes start to fall”
by Jared Glovsky
In the good old days of paper and ink, it was fairly easy to get rid of information you didn’t want
anyone else to see. Just ask a corporate raider from the 1980s how much mileage he got out of
his high-tech paper shredder. For the rest of us, the trusty match and lighter fluid worked handily
if there was something of the utmost sensitivity we wanted permanently lost and forgotten.
Paper has always been easy to dispose of. Ray Bradbury told us the temperature at which it
burns (451 degrees Fahrenheit, or course) and it’s been an easy fix ever since. Even then, some
people simply crumpled up their documents and threw them into the trash, forsaking shredding
and burning, never thinking that private investigators and others with ill-intent could, or would,
easily retrieve them.
Some people became artful at dumpster diving in those days.
In the new millennium, paper and ink have been largely replaced by digital information –
technically called optic information – that is stored on CD-roms and DVDs. More and more our
world’s information, which once stuffed file cabinets enough to stretch around the world, is being
stored on discs.
This has lulled many people into a false sense of security. The impulse when destroying a CDrom for security purposes is to follow the old paper and ink standard: break it in half, then break it
in half again, and then…oh hell, break the quarters into eighths and THEN it won’t be readable by
any computer, right? I mean, you can’t tape it together and stick it in your drive.
Can you?
No, you can’t. But the truth about digital information is that a lot of it (some 50 pages) occupies
only a tiny spot about the size of the period at the end of this sentence – on your average CD or
DVD. People think if they break it apart, the information is no longer retrievable, but this is simply
not the case.
“People think it’s paranoia,” says Joe Lendabarker, “but it’s very easy to get a lot of information
off a CD or DVD from just a tiny fragment of the physical disc.”
Lendabarker is Assistant Manager at Digital Data Destruction Services (D3S), Iron River, a
company that is leading the emerging industry of digital data ‘shredding.’ Under the auspices of
its parent company CD Rom Inc., D3S has been operating in Iron River since February of 2004,
shredding bytes (as it were) for the nation’s leading security software company.
Mike Martino is the General Manager of D3S. He says CD Rom Inc’s founder Roger Hutchison
started in the late 1980s devising new technology to put information onto CD’s and DVDs. In the
late 1990s, at the proverbial dawn of the digital age (as most of us know it today) he was
approached by the Defense Department and asked if he could devise a way to REMOVE
information from discs in a 100 percent secure fashion.
“Roger fashioned several prototypes,” says Martino, “and in the process, established what has
become an industry – and soon to be commercial – standard for digital data destruction.” That standard involves grinding the information side (the shiny side) of a CD or DVD down to 250
microns, or, in layman’s terms, the consistency of talcom powder. Then, and only then, does the
government, and other D3S contractors, consider the information destroyed in its entirety and
entirely safe from being retrieved.
This standard will have tremendous impact in a society where the digital revolution has made
identity theft all too common.
“Today, our most sensitive information is stored digitally,” says Martino, “bank records, medical
records, ATM transactions, all of it is recorded and stored on discs. Our process ensures that this
information is permanently destroyed when it needs to be. Otherwise, it’s still there, and the right
type of people can still find it, just like years ago they went after discarded paper documents”.
According to Martino, D3S works primarily with security software at the moment – leftover CD
packages that either did not sell in retailers or have been outdated by newer versions.
“There is a black market for older software,” says Lendabarker.