Fourth Amendment Hard Disk Wipe

Recently I replied to a thread on a mailing list about wiping hard disk drives.

source: http://cheezburger.com/tehpeanutbutterkitteh/lolz/View/2735751680

I'd just spent a few hours over a recent weekend playing around with the hdparm command in Linux because it has the ability to use the ATA Secure Erase feature, which is much faster and more comprehensive than software wipe utilities like the trusty Darik's Boot and Nuke. For example, I recently wiped a 500GB drive in just over two hours.

I was experimenting with hdparm and secure erase because I wanted to try it out and because I was prepping an old drive to give to a friend. After the secure erase finished and I verified that the drive contained no data, I wrote a little shell script to overwrite the entire thing with the text of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Something I was inspired to do after reading about @ioerror's overwriting usb sticks with the Bill of Rights.

I mentioned this script on a mailing list and a friend replied that I was "so subversive." Now, I'm almost certain the reply was in jest and that he doesn't honestly feel that way, but I suspect there are folks who do think it's subversive. I think it's a sad commentary on the state of the U.S. collective psyche when we consider Constitutional guarantees as subversive.

A handful of people replied to me that they wanted the script. Well, it's not pretty, nor fast and Hal Pomeranz and a thousand other Unix beards could probably come up with a better solution, but it works. I've added a measure of protection to it because I imagine some people will screw themselves with this, so be careful, mind your devices.

#!/bin/bash
# This is a hack I wrote to overwrite $1 with the 4th Amendment.
# It's not pretty, it's not fast, but it works.
# If $1 is a device, when it's full, errors will be thrown and not handled.
# If $1 is not a device, the block device that it resides on will eventually
# fill up, if this script is left running.

# The next line will cause the script to exit on any errors, like
# when the device is full. Hey, I said it was a hack.
set -e

echo "This hack overwrites $1 with the text of the 4th Amendment."
echo "ALL DATA WILL BE LOST."

echo "Are you absofrigginlutely sure you want to continue?"
select yn in "Yes" "No"; do
    case $yn in
        Yes ) exec > $1
            while : 
                do echo "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, " \
                "houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and " \
                "seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, " \
                "but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and " \
                "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the " \
                "persons or things to be seized.";
                done;;
        No ) exit;;
    esac
done

To use this save it as a shell script on a Linux system and invoke it from the command line as <command name> <device name>. When the device is full, the program will exit on error. Enjoy.