wedrifid comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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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!