Nov 7, 2008 04:50 PM
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So the thought police are on their way to your underground control chamber, and you need to erase your hard drives fast. They can break the crypto on your secret docs, and even if you overwrite them with a bunch of junk data, they've got forensic techniques that could pull an erased file out of a shark's ass. What do you do? Take Hackaday's advice, and use a little thermite.
Here's your hard drive. Stick that in your evidence case, authoritarian scum! 
In late September, Jason Rollette figured out the best way to preserve your Fourth Amendment right to privacy when the data police come knocking was to use the pyrotechnic mixture of aluminum powder and metal oxide known as thermite. Keep this in mind when the Terminators are coming too. Rollette writes:
Our goal was to completely destroy the drive while it was still in the computer case. The theoretical application is to destroy the disk at a moments notice so it won’t fall into the wrong hands. After testing multiple methods, placing about 1 pound of thermite in a clay flower pot and lighting from the drain hole in the bottom yielded the best results. This could easily be placed in the 5.25″ bays above the drive.
Good to know! Also, it just gives me a nice, visceral thrill to watch hard drives burn and explode after a long day slaving over a not-hot-enough keyboard.
How to: Thermite Hard Drive Destruction [via Hackaday]
Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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