Every year millions of tons of discarded government, business and personally owned computers end up in one of the sprawling, smoldering e-waste dumps in developing countries. Your wedding photos may be in Ghana, resting against multi-million dollar defense contracts. Your financial records may be in India, buried beneath Homeland Security white papers.

University of British Columbia journalism students visited dumps in Ghana, China and India, and, at every dump, they discovered criminal gangs doing the same thing–scavenging through the mountains of computers in search of hard drives containing personal and financial information.

Finding the data is easy and lucrative. All around the dumps in every country were markets where vendors piled their tables high with found hard drives. One of the students bought several in Ghana, where the annual per capita income is $2,500, for $35 each.

They took the hard drives to a computer scientist in the Ghanaian capital. Within minutes he displayed someone’s family photos, credit card transactions and bank records.

Another of the drives belonged to Northrop Grumman, one of America’s largest military contractors and contained worth hundreds of millions of dollars awarded by the Department of Defense, NASA, Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration.

The students’ professor, Peter Klein, a TV producer and Emmy-winning journalist, showed the hard drive and its contents to James Durie, an FBI data security expert.

Durie was shocked by the discovery, but explained that whoever was responsible for wiping the hard drive probably thought the drive was completely cleared. He then picked up a hammer and dealt several solid blows to the hard drive—a demonstration of what he called the only surefire way to clean a hard drive.

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