Originally Posted by
abelenky
On this point, I disagree. Once data has been overwritten once, it becomes very difficult to recover; essentially you'd just be looking for a weak "shadow" signal of the previous magnetic bit.
Once data has been overwritten 4 or more times, it is absolutely impossible to figure out what was there before. And most off-the-shelf data wiping tools will do multiple overwrites.
If there is any source/evidence that a government agency can recover data that has been specifically wiped, I'm willing to listen. But short of that evidence, the idea goes against everything i know about hardware, software, and physics.
I agree.
And Edward Snowden has said that properly implemented "encryption works".
The folks who seem to think that the NSA has divine powers don't know anything about computers or forensics.
The way law enforcement "breaks encryption" is to depend on keyloggers or sticky notes with passwords on them. They "recover data" when people hit the "delete" key, not when they deliberately overwrite data.
I, too, am willing to listen to evidence to the contrary.
I haven't seen any.