Government Regulations (for Secure Data Removal)

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Governments often have a need to destroy classified information, so several regulations concerning the subject have been made. To mislead opponents, publicly available regulations may intentionally underrate the data destruction methods, while the real regulations remain classified. Many of the available regulations are also quite old.

Eraser offers two overwriting methods that are based on the clearing and sanitization matrix in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM also known as US DoD 5220.22-M) of the US Department of Defense.

According to this manual, overwriting is not approved for sanitizing media that contains TOP SECRET data. This would require degaussing or physically destroying the disk by disintegrating, incinerating, pulverizing, shredding, or melting it.

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