> Asking for an independent third party verification is reasonable. Asking for it may be reasonable, demanding it certainly isn't. You can't demand that somebo

> Asking for an independent third party verification is reasonable. Asking for it may be reasonable, demanding it certainly isn't. You can't demand that somebody gives a third party access to their hard drive. First, it's completely unreasonable from a privacy aspect. Given the level of personal data most people store or process on their computers, it is even less reasonable than asking someone to have a third party dig through their house to "verify" that they don't have something. Second, it's completely unreasonable because it's pointless against a malicious actor - they could have cloned the disk before deleting the data and there would be no way to detect it. It does make sense only to confirm that the data wasn't accidentally left on the disk due to an insecure erasure method. When dealing with someone competent with computers, the proper solution (which they ultimately arrived at) is to have him describe the method he used to delete it, possibly ask him to verify it (e.g. via some form of "dd | grep"), and that's it.