I have Delete on my desk but haven't had a chance to read it yet. 

There are a number of vendors who have developed technology variously
referred to as "digital shredding" that works this way. The idea is that
something that is burned to write-once media cannot be physically deleted.
"Best" practice to date has been to copy records that have not met their
retention period from the old media to new media and then physically destroy
the old media. This is labor-intentive, error-prone, expensive, and
unreliable from a process perspective. Other than that it's a great
approach. :)

This digital shredding process neatly addresses the challenge by rendering
those records unreadable and unrecoverable - and demonstrably so from a
mathematical perspective. The old "delete the pointer" approach still left
the information forensically recoverable; digital shredding does not. It is
analogous to shredding paper into confetti - or rather, pulverization of
paper without requiring the cumbersome approach described above. It's even
almost analogous to degaussing tapes which will be reused. If you do proper
degaussing, there's very little likelihood of being able to get anything off
the tapes forensically. The primary difference is that you wouldn't recover
that storage space as you would with the degaussed tape. 

And there is another discontinuity between electronic and physical records
disposition. As more information is stored not on single, relatively
inexpensive and disposable optical media disks but rather on solid state
storage, disk arrays, and the like, the requirement to physically destroy
the media becomes problematic as well. It's easy to destroy a file, or a box
of paper, or a truck full of paper. It's easy to destroy a single CD, or a
100-CD span, or a jukebox full of CDs. It's even easy to destroy the hard
drive inside a copier. But it makes very little sense to me to be required
to destroy 2 TB of storage to get rid of a single record series - and what
do you do with records stored on a 10 petabyte storage area network, which
may not even store files but only blocks of data?

I would argue that the digital shredding approach is the most appropriate
approach today to ensure that an electronic record is destroyed without
causing undue burden to organizations. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one
at industry conferences. But I think this is a great example of where we
need to figure out how best to apply our tried and true processes and
practices in a new way that is, or should be, defensible. I think it's
incumbent on us to understand this approach and recommend it to our
organizations, identify its weaknesses and how to overcome them, and
incorporate it into what we believe to be best practices just as we have
done in the past for destruction of paper, magnetic tape, microfilm, CDs,
etc. That also means getting it into guidance documents like, say, DoD
5015.2 and getting the vendor community to develop or license it and
incorporate it into their solutions. 

Regards, 

Jesse Wilkins, CRM
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(303) 574-0749 direct
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins

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