3 ms·

Even digital material exists in the physical world. Disk drives, flash memory and other storage hardware could still exist and must be destroyed to prevent capt

Even digital material exists in the physical world. Disk drives, flash memory and other storage hardware could still exist and must be destroyed to prevent capture by adversaries.

quotemstr 5y ago
If these devices are encrypted, physical destruction is less of an imperative. There's no excuse for not encrypting all data at rest these days.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  If allegations of Russian and Chinese support of the Taliban is true, it’s reasonable to be wary that foreign nation-state agents could acquire the hardware. Better to sabotage the hardware just in case they have the compute resources to break the encryption.
  - radiator 5y ago
    This sounds as if we don't really trust encryption, which makes one wonder, why then go into all this trouble and encrypt the data in the first place?
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      Because it still protects against certain threats. For example it could protect against the case where a laptop is stolen by a petty thief who didn’t realize the device had valuable intelligence.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Destroying the media is not strictly necessary. It's a lot easier to instruct a rack of servers, or even a set of (centrally managed) desktop machines, to wipe itself than it is to physically destroy it, let alone the equivalent amount of information on paper. Moreover, assuming encryption is in place, destroying the keys without touching the actual data is generally sufficient. You will probably want to wipe the data then destroy the hardware as defense in depth, but in a dire emergency, taking the one thermite charge to the central key management server and its backup and cutting the power feed to the rest of the infrastructure is going to be good enough. With human readable information on paper, you simply have no other option than physical destruction, which is an extremely slow and labor-intensive and manual process. Even with preparation, you can't really accelerate it much, whereas with digital information prepared for the possibility of needing emergency destruction, it's a matter of pushing a button and the data is gone less than a second later. The flipside of that is that the worst crimes of a future surveillance state will likely stay hidden even after it gets toppled, unlike the East German Stasi that failed to destroy many of its documents in time.

Even digital material exists in the physical world. Disk drives, flash memory and other storage hardware could still exist and must be destroyed to prevent capture by adversaries.

quotemstr 5y ago

If these devices are encrypted, physical destruction is less of an imperative. There's no excuse for not encrypting all data at rest these days.

jdavis703 5y ago
If allegations of Russian and Chinese support of the Taliban is true, it’s reasonable to be wary that foreign nation-state agents could acquire the hardware. Better to sabotage the hardware just in case they have the compute resources to break the encryption.
- radiator 5y ago
  This sounds as if we don't really trust encryption, which makes one wonder, why then go into all this trouble and encrypt the data in the first place?
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Because it still protects against certain threats. For example it could protect against the case where a laptop is stolen by a petty thief who didn’t realize the device had valuable intelligence.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Destroying the media is not strictly necessary. It's a lot easier to instruct a rack of servers, or even a set of (centrally managed) desktop machines, to wipe itself than it is to physically destroy it, let alone the equivalent amount of information on paper. Moreover, assuming encryption is in place, destroying the keys without touching the actual data is generally sufficient. You will probably want to wipe the data then destroy the hardware as defense in depth, but in a dire emergency, taking the one thermite charge to the central key management server and its backup and cutting the power feed to the rest of the infrastructure is going to be good enough. With human readable information on paper, you simply have no other option than physical destruction, which is an extremely slow and labor-intensive and manual process. Even with preparation, you can't really accelerate it much, whereas with digital information prepared for the possibility of needing emergency destruction, it's a matter of pushing a button and the data is gone less than a second later. The flipside of that is that the worst crimes of a future surveillance state will likely stay hidden even after it gets toppled, unlike the East German Stasi that failed to destroy many of its documents in time.