Now that the election is over, and the shock of a Trump Presidency is wearing off, we thought we’d bring you a story that for some reason had not been widely reported at all. In fact none of the big news outlets chose to run with it. Back in May 2016, The Washington Free Beacon ran a story called : ‘ Clinton Campaign Made Payments to Hard Drive and Document Destruction Company‘
CLINTON CAMPAIGN SHREDS
In their piece they discovered that the Clinton campaign had hired the services of a company that specialised in secure hard drive shredding. Campaign finances show that in February and March of this year, payments had been made to a secure shredding company based out of Nevada called American Destruction, Inc. American Destruction, Inc offer one service and one service only. And that is the destruction of hard drives. In their own words:
We now physically destroy hard drives, whether from a desktop or a laptop computer, printers, or anything else a hard drive can come from.
Our hard drive destruction procedures take place either at your site or at our secure facility in Sparks, NV. This decision is yours to decide based on cost and convenience to you. In either situation, the hard drive will be destroyed by a shredding.
We have a dedicated machine for hard drive destruction. We will also record the serial numbers of all drives to be destroyed to be kept in our records. A copy of this log can be provided to you as well.
Now it’s worth saying that despite the fact that Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Clinton of deleting her emails even after having received a subpoena, there’s no evidence to suggest that the hard drives that her campaign had destroyed had anything at all to do with her private server. However, the original article did have a suggestive tone to it; almost trying to suggest to the reader that perhaps the hard drives destroyed were in fact her private ones.
However, here’s the thing. We are asked all the time to destroy hard drives. It’s a practice that is more common that you think. And it’s not just in one sector, across all arenas. We work with councils, schools, law firms, traders, doctors, etc… and the reason a lot of these people shred their hard drives is because they just can not risk some of the data on there falling into the wrong hards. For all our clients the goal is to product their staff as well as their customers and students data. Things are becoming ever stricter now, with larger fines being handed down to companies that don’t fully comply with The Data Protection Act.
That said, as someone who loves conspiracy movies, I did enjoy the original article as a piece of entertainment. In my opinion, it was the Campaign being prudent from prying eyes and perhaps even The Press or crazed DT fans? Who knows, either way it serves as a good reminder to all of you at home, to shred not just your hard drives, but also the confidential papers lying around that you don’t actually need to keep.