As someone who has worked in IT for a very long time you might be surprised to learn exactly how much data you can recover from crashed and even smashed hard drives. That said… Imran Awan is still in some deep crap because of this. There are ways to absolutely destroy the data on a hard drive and anyone who works in the field should know that smashing them doesn’t always equal that particular end result.
As written for The Daily Caller by Mark Tapscott:
Somebody must have thought they were hiding something by smashing those computer hard-drives the FBI recovered from the home of Imran Awan, Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s former information technology (IT) aide.
But odds are excellent they were wrong. Federal law enforcement authorities may have already recovered and read whatever was on those hard drives.
“It depends on what happens, but even if it is hit with a hammer, it probably doesn’t damage the platters that actually hold the data, which remains recoverable,” said Tom Hakim, engineering supervisor for werecoverdata.com, a New York-based lab that specializes in difficult digital retrieval.
“In most cases, it’s very likely” the information on a smashed hard drive can be recovered “in two or three days, maybe a week,” Hakim said.
His lab, which does extensive work for law enforcement and Fortune 500 corporations, has also recovered data from disks that were in fires and that had been submerged in water.
That may be very bad news for Pakistani-born Imran. He and his younger brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina Alvi and his best friend Rao Abbas are criminal suspects in a federal investigation first made public in February into abuse of the congressional IT servers, including the possible transfer of data, emailsand files from the offices of dozens of House Democrats.
Whatever Is On Imran Awan’s Smashed Hard Drives Likely Can Be Recovered
