Chesterfield County included this language in its Invitation For Bid for
a new copier contract 


SECURITY OF DATA

The contractor shall ensure that any copier removed from service for any
reason (repair, replacement, etc.) shall have all County data totally
deleted/wiped/erased/securely and irretrievably overwritten from the
internal hard drives and/or other electro-mechanical components of the
copiers prior to the copiers leaving County property.


The vendor has made noises about charging us x-hundred of dollars for
removing each hard drive, but of course, the IFB being a legal contract,
we don't really care if they remove the hard drive or not, as long as
they ensure that "any copier removed from service for any reason
(repair, replacement, etc.) shall have all County data totally
deleted/wiped/erased/securely and irretrievably overwritten from the
internal hard drives and/or other electro-mechanical components of the
copiers prior to the copiers leaving County property".  We're thinking
they'll end up just giving us the hard drives anyway.  

One thing we also asked for in the IFB was that each device be equipped
with an "image overwrite/data delete" feature, and that it be active
from the moment of install.  In effect, all the copiers we leased from
this particular vendor overwrite the hard drive at the conclusion of
each copying/printing/scanning/faxing job, so our worst case scenario
would be one job (the last one run) still resident on the device hard
drive, and even that would require some sort of electronic failure of
the image overwrite feature AND a failure on the part of the vendor to
comply with the above stated term in the IFB.


Jerome Kendall
Records Administrator
Chesterfield County

Our IT Manager looked into this after the CBS story and then told
department managers to budget at the end of copier lease cycles to
purchase the hard drives for removal/destruction (about $200 each for
most of the machines we are currently using).  

As for making old hard drives unreadable, my predecessor preferred using
them for target practice.  I'm not sure if this is a method recommended
by LVA (officially or un).  

Rosanna Bencoach
General Registrar, New Kent


-----Original Message-----
From: Breeden, John B. [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: Just making an observation

Bob,
I had not even been aware that copiers had this feature until a CBS news
story several weeks ago.  Certainly degaussing or the use of other
methods that obliterate the information is warranted prior to the
surplus of copiers used to copy or scan confidential information.
John   

-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Records Officer's Listserv
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lyons, Robert (VDH)
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 11:31 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Just making an observation

John

Following this line of thinking, what are your thoughts on copiers with
hard drives having copies of potentially sensitive material?

Bob Lyons - VDH - Charlottesville
 

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