Hard Drive Destroyed – FAIL!

Update: Effective Sept. 2019 Total Secure Shredding is no longer accepting E-waste. We will continue to accept computer towers and laptops only in conjunction with hard drive destruction. We regret the inconvenience and invite you to check out our other services.

Fabrice Touree is the now the infamous Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who has suddenly become one of the sole scapegoats for the 2008 financial disaster.

So how does a midlevel 28 year old thrust himself into the limelight as a target for SEC investigators?

Although there doesn’t seem to be any admission by the SEC or Goldman Sachs that Touree was the ringleader who masterminded the creation of billions of dollars of dubious mortgage backed securities, he did do something to put himself into the hotseat.

It appears Mr. Touree simply threw out an old laptop that was later found “discarded in a a garbage area in a downtown apartment building” as indicted in a recent New York Times article.

The laptop was still receiving emails when the eventual user of this “recycled” laptop recognized the name in the emails, Touree, was also a name finding it’s way into news headlines.

An article by the Huffington Post points out that the e-mails received between Touree and his lawyer “discussed how to handle accusations that he and his employer, Goldman Sachs, had played a key role in engineering a near-financial apocalypse.”

This indeed has played out to be quite unfortunate for Mr. Touree since his case is apparently the only one being prosecuted by the SEC.

I would guess that Touree never thought for a second about the open email client on this casually discarded laptop.

Unfortunately, we often forget how much “stuff” is left sitting on those old computers. Most folks are replacing their computer every 2 to 3 years. And let’s be honest, 2 years is not that long ago!

You’re very likely to be using the same online email account, with the same bank with the same bank account number, and still living at the same address.

And, as we see in the case of Mr. Touree, we’re also not very likely to safeguard the information on our computers with passwords.

The above mentioned Huffington Post article goes into some of the current debate over the best way to dispose of the data on our hard drives from using software tools that “wipe” a hard drive to “the most surefire way to discard data” by actual physical destruction.

If you decide to read farther down the article to the comment section, you see the debate rage on about whether reformatting your disk drives is enough, to dropping your computer in salt water, to taking a hammer and giving your hard drive a few good whacks.

Personally, what I recommend is physical destruction. And to take it a step further, shredding so the hard drive is in multiple pieces.

Is this overkill?

Maybe. Although I still get questions as to whether the pieces are small enough.

(I won’t even get into the conversation I’ve had about the NSA and electron microscopes theoretically being able to read individual 0’s and 1’s off hard drive fragments!)

Anyway, when it comes to the secure destruction of hard drives, including my personal hard drives that need disposal, I feel 100% confident when all I have left is hard drive rubble.

Check out the video I took of the very first hard drive I shredded.

The cost of ensuring that the information held on your hard drive will never ever be seen by anyone else again is only $10 per hard drive when you bring the hard drive down to our secure shredding facility. You can stand by our view window while we run the hard drive through the shredder and then take a look at the pieces when we’re all done! (For an additional $10, we will remove the hard drive from your laptop or desktop computer and recycle the computer for you.)

Our secure drop-off shredding facility is located at:

3584 Hancock St.
San Diego, CA 92110

Hours of Drop-Off:

Mon through Fri: 8am to 5pm
Sat: 10am to 1pm

You don’t need to make an appointment. Just drop by whenever you’re ready.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to give me a call: (619) 295-5474

Until Next Time… Keep Totally Secure,

Your friend,

Mike
Head Shredding Guy