[Cryptography] Ex-CIA Joshua Schulte Describes His Data/Crypto Hiding Prowess

[Bill Stewart]

On 3/4/2020 2:27 PM, Jon Callas wrote:
>> On Mar 4, 2020, at 3:52 AM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:
>> Also worth noting that the NSA still mainly insists on physical destruction of hard disks.  (An NSA-approved - likely very high powered - degausser is sufficient but even then they recommend physically damaging the disks themselves.)

Back in the 80s, I built a classified VAX lab in a TEMPEST room under 
Army AR 380-380 rules at Bell Labs in Holmdel. The choices for 
declassifying hard drives that were approved back then were
- NSA-certified wiping software (not for Unix, and certification was 
expensive.)
- NSA-certified big honking magnet (not near my computers, thank you!)
- Physical destruction (There's a machine shop in the basement! With 
Sandblasters!)

I was no longer running the lab when they declassified it, so my 
successor got to have the fun of doing that.  Most 1980s sysadmins had a 
disk drive on their wall with patterns scratched on it from a head 
crash.  Hers? Shiny clean sandblasted metal.