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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

How secure was that deletion of the tape? Has anyone taken 21st century technology and tried to recover what was on it?

I remember reading about a concerted effort several years ago to try to recover the lost tape:

But the last I heard, they were not able to get anything useful.

They were not able to actually obtain enough access to the tape to do anything useful.

That's a fantastic question.

If we can use electron microscopes to recover trace data from hard drive platters, how much harder could magnetic tape be?

I have not heard of a documented case of erased/overwritten data recovered from a hard drive. I have read articles, like this one, debunking the idea: http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html

This is not to say it's the same as recovering audio from analog tape.

Good to know. Didn't realize I believed in a myth :)

A good question but keep in mind that in addition to the deletion it is a tape that is about 42 years old as well and has further degraded.

We're talking about recording equipment used by the President, not an average Dictaphone tape. It was likely erased VERY thoroughly.

We're talking about 40-year-old technology, though. Modern forensic tools are extremely powerful.

According to the Official Story, it was just a normal erasure accidentally done by a secretary who was transcribing it.

I don't necessarily buy that story, but a thorough analysis could shed some evidence on that, too.