WikiLeaks' Cablegate server touted on eBay for $3k-plus by Swedes Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has attacked a former ally after one of the servers used to host the infamous Cablegate material was put up for auction on eBay. The document-leaking operation – headed by Julian Assange™ – slammed Bahnhof, a Swedish internet service provider, for flogging the once-rented Dell Poweredge R410 …
If there's still an intact graphic card then the data might still be on there!
I presume that only data that had been displayed on the screen would still be on the video card..... unless it had one of those imaginative and mysterious prefetch queues.... where it might have been slurping data on the side......whilst the user was waiting for the screen to refresh......during a Wikileaks session.....
Methods a and b (degaussing) render many or most server disks unusable as it also erases the nonrwritable timing; method m (physical destruction) also destroys reusability. As for method d, I believe the DoD instruction (d/l version dated 1997) has been superseded. I seem to recall one that involved 7 overwrites, beginning with all zeroes and followed by all ones, then two pairs of a pattern and its complement, ending with a final overwrite of all zeroes. I think verification of each overwrite also was required. Each bit was changed at least four times, and it took a while on a disk of reasonable size.
Of course, since the disks contained top secret information, the real requirement would be to destroy the disks.
"The original information cannot be recreated, not even by NSA.”
which is exactly what they want you to think! remember when they said that they we very concerned over international PAYG SIM cards (think MINT telecom was specifically mentioned) as since there was no account linked they were "untraceable" .... Al Quaeda believed this as another US officially unwisely let the cat out of the bag a year or so later saying that AQ were all using MINT SIMs so they knew exactly where they were from cell tower records!
Just to let any Americans who might buy this thing know, its technically a Classified Information system as Classified Information (just leaking it doesn't kill the classification, it has to be properly declassified by relevant authority, in this case, the State Department's Consular Service or maybe USAID as the material was stolen from a PRT in Iraq) was introduced to it, and it will probably be seized by Customs upon entry. Doesn't matter if the data isn't there anymore, it was introduced, and some fragments may remain.
The UK may have similar restrictions. Since the documents didn't carry a NATO caveat, the rest of NATO is probably safe though.
The NATO marking on a document is somewhat different to the usual EYES caveats. Rather than meaning 'anyone with sufficient clearance from NATO countries can see this' it means that it is a NATO-accountable document, i.e. it has to be made available through NATO information systems. For some classes of documents, it means that it must also be produced in both official languages.
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