In May, I wrote an article about how many used hard drives still contain extremely sensitive information. Today, I was doing some follow up research when I came across an absolutely shocking article on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's web site.

Let me set the scene. A group of journalism students from British Columbia, Canada, were in Ghana investigating what happens to the developed world's discarded computer equipment. While in Ghana, they bought a number of hard drives, then took them home and plugged it in. One of them contained information about multi-million dollar US defense contracts between the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and a military contractor!

Here is the scariest part - accessing the data did not require any special skills. The students plugged in the hard drive and got instant access to some extraordinarily sensitive information!