Why is it so easy for some Americans to believe that we can reconstruct laptops

[Horse with no Name]

blown up and retrieve Al Quaeda documents, yet still find it easy to believe that 5,000 emails cannot be retrieved from undamaged computers?

[Duer 157099]

1. Different situations

In one case, hard drive space is actually overwritten by new data, whereas in the other case, the physical damage is not sufficient to completely destroy the magnetic data.

[ThomCat]

2. People believe what they are told,

have short memories, and don't worry about contradictions when it's about stuff they don't really understand.
:(

[JuniperLea]

3. Because they are being told what to think...

I know my company goes through a lot to "scrub" our computers before donating them to schools, etc. You can't just hit "delete". If it were that easy, we would have rid ourselves of Dimson a long time ago.

[uppityperson]

4. Why do you hate Amerika?

[northzax]

5. depends on how badly you want to erase something

if I was designing this system (for unretrievable emails) I would have very limited storage, so the hard drive was rewritten, over and over (among other things) the hard drive on a laptop, for instance, is actually pretty hardy, and traces of data can be reconstructed, unless the user went to great lengths to destroy the data in question first.

[givemebackmycountry]

6. That would be FIVE MILLION e-mails - not 5k

Check out the PEW report that was released today -
America is even more stupid than we think.

Thank you FOX NOISE!

[Deja Q]

7. Depends on the form of destruction...

It's easier to recover recent data off a recently discarded hard drive than recover data from a server whose hard drives are frequently updated/reused/whatever.

Amongst other factors; being clever isn't necessarily one of them.

While there are times I agree something seems suspect, this ain't one of them.