Did Hillary Clinton Really Have Her Aides Smash Her Devices?

[ehrnst]

15. And many on the left who hated her also clutched their pearls at the very thought.

It was state department protocol to destroy one's phone.

If Clinton had in fact used a federally-issued Blackberry like President Obama does, it might well have been destroyed after she used it, too. In accordance with a 2012 General Services Administration bulletin, all agencies must either recycle or donate used electronics for reuse. The State Department abides by that policy, too; if Clinton had been using State-issued devices, they would have gone through a similar, if more standardized, process of data deletion. A State Department official explained in a statement to WIRED that "department security policies mandate that all electronic devices are cleared of sensitive or classified information prior to reuse or disposal.” Some devices are wiped and reused, in other words, while others are destroyed as part of the recycling process.

There are plenty of ways to approach data destruction through software-based deletion or overwriting. But hardware destruction has the advantage of simplicity; An amateur might not be certain that a software deletion tool has rendered data unrecoverable against advanced forensic techniques, given that it is sometimes possible to restore "deleted" data. In mechanical hard drives, for example, the system may mark data as deleted but leave it in place until it is overwritten by new inputs. But smash storage hardware to small enough bits, and not even the cleverest forensic techniques can put the data back together coherently. "You can easily physically destroy things," says Brown. "You just need to make sure you're thorough in doing it."

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/actually-clinton-destroyed-phones-better/