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David_Gerard comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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Minor note: this claim is obsolete and should not be used to make the point you're trying to make.
Peter Gutmann's original list of steps to erase a hard drive is obsolete. Gutmann himself is particularly annoyed that it appears to have taken on the status of a voodoo ritual. As that Wikipedia article notes, "There is yet no published evidence as to intelligence agencies' ability to recover files whose sectors have been overwritten, although published Government security procedures clearly consider an overwritten disk to still be sensitive. Companies specializing in recovery of damaged media (e.g., media damaged by fire, water or otherwise) cannot recover completely overwritten files. No private data recovery company currently claims that it can reconstruct completely overwritten data." Overwriting with random data is enough in practice in 2011, and was in 2008 for that matter.
Scientists have played with electron microscopes and established that in principle someone with the right tools could examine the final state of a section of magnetic memory and distinguish an earlier state. It's just that nobody has said tools in practice and the engineering tasks to create tools that worked reliably for the task is an absolute nightmare.
One could argue that the quoted claim is technically correct.
Citation needed, one talkiing about hard disks as of 2008 at the earliest, or an equivalent magnetic problem.
A supporting claim needing to be stretched as far as "well, it's not technically false!" still strikes me as not being a good example to try to persuade people with.
I am reluctant to comply with demands for citations on something that is not particularly controversial and, more importantly, does not contradict the references you yourself provided. Apart from reading your own references (Gutmann and wikipedia) you can look at the most substantial criticism of the idea that there are real world agencies who could recover your overwritten data, that by Daniel Feenberg.
His general point is that while there has been some limited success with playing with powerful microscopes the current process is so ridiculously impractical and unreliable that there is no chance any existing intelligence agency would be able to pull it off.
Not a position I have argued against, nor would I be inclined to.
Fair enough!