Cell phone recycling: delete, then dispose [telecom]

I took my obsolete analog sets back to the carrier's store but they were refused.

Apparently the carriers run campaigns to collect old sets but only at certain periods; otherwise they're not interested. It didn't appear they were interested in an analog phone in any case.

Ironically, I know a senior citizen who wants a 'dead' cellphone just for 911 emergency use but can't find one from agencies that supposedly claim to provide them as part of recycling.

So, besides using C4 *and* a small nuclear weapon to generate an EMP, what's the sure way to erase info from a phone?

So what's the official NSA-approved procedure from erasing Top Secret data from a cellphone before shipping it to China for recycling?

They ship them to China because the Chinese have already intercepted and stored everything that's on them.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Do any vendors sell simple adaptors that just convert from the plug on the output end of an old charger to the jack on a newer phone?

Hit the memory card with a sledge hammer and pulverize it.

The US military has banned USB thumb drives and other removable solid-state memory because the information cannot be erased by overwriting. Because each memory cell can be rewritten only a limited number of times, the manufacurers included circuitry which stores the data of successive writes to different cells each time, to even out the wear. Overwriting a file many times, the standard way to obliterate data, doesn't work.

If the file(s) is/are encrypted, why would they care? A USB drive is like any other media: you have to assume that it will get lost/stolen/discarded at some point, and take precautions _before_ the fact.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Obviously one should delete call logs, photos, and speed dials, voice memos, etc.. Some phones have a "super reset" which clears everything out; that should be used too.

This topic came up before here and someone posted a website that gave instructions for a variety of phones, even old ones. You have to key in a l-o-n-g string of digits to get into supervisory mode and a command to wipe out.

I hate to be cynical, but I suspect some "phone recylcing sites" simply take the phones they collect and throw them in the trash; just an excuse to get you into the store.

Of course the Vz wireless site offers "certified" used cellphones as free ones, so obviously some are recycled. I'd be nervous about them unless the battery is new.

I think that some recycling efforts are just that: they recycle the phones they receive as donations by selling them to precious-metal recovery companies, and use the funds they receive to help the group they are trying to benefit.

There's no need to by cynical about it: I put my old AMPS phone in the bin to benefit soldiers, and I'd be very surprised if the actual instrument ever made it to Iraq or Afghanistan. The key, you see, is to consider what _doesn't_ happen as well as what does: the toxins never went into my local landfill. Recycling isn't always about money

- anyone who's helped the Boy Scouts collect old newspapers can attest to that - but is, rather, a chance to become a part of a change to our common outlook on life. When kids see adults recycling, they grow up with the habit of thinking about which bin to put something in when they don't need it anymore.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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P.S.

The old Bell System was always aggressively into recycling since it owned everything. Telephone sets or their components would be re- used, even if certain parts were replaced. Take apart a 500/554 set and you'll find the network, transmitter, receiver all have different mfr dates.

C.O. had bags to recycle copper wire. (However, a huge quantity of interior copper wiring in buildings and even key system boxes was left in place even if phones were removed. In the 1960s the Bell System worked with builders to pre-wire homes and put phone wires in all the rooms regardless of what the resident would actually order.)

In the 1950s they recycled 300 sets by repackaging them in a modern case and calling it the 5302 set. To subscribers it looked like the newer 500 set.

In another issue, as to recycling electronics to extract rare metals, sometimes the chemistry to do that can be pretty nasty and more environmentally caustic than merely throwing the set in the trash. Indeed, I doubt a cellphone "leaks".

Technical advances in RF and microwave technology, detectors, signal processing, and electronics generally made at the MIT "Rad Lab", Harvard RLE, Bell Labs, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Sperry, and many other places during WW II (much of this building in substantial part on earlier innovations made at Stanford by F. E. Terman and students of his including the Varian brothers and Hewlett and Packard, and the unsung Prof. of Physics W. W. Hansen in the 1930s) all led to the development of the microwave maser within the first post-war decade, and then the laser laser than five years later -- not to mention a dozen or so Nobel Prizes for physicists who participated in these wartime developments, then took their new knowledge and toys home with them and applied them to basic scientific experiments.

Some details of this are in an overview of the history of the laser at

Updated versions of this will be showing up all over the place during the 50th anniversary celebration of the laser next year:

During WW II Bell Labs not only produced military communication facilities, but also advanced targeting control electronics. One of the volumes of the Bell Labs history is devoted to military products.

Over the years the Bell System, like many other corporations, was taken to task for its defense systems work, including its management of Sandia Labs, a nuclear weapons facility. Stockholder proposals sought to force the company out of that business. (AT&T gave up mgmt of Sandia in 1993 according to Wiki.)

One of the above mentioned organizations wrote a book about their efforts, and part of their efforts included weapons research, including incendiaries, better known as firebombs, which caused more destruction and killed more people than the atomic bombs did. Napalm got a nasty reputation during the Vietnam War, but it was developed and used during WW II among various fire weapons. Fire weapons burned with an extremely hot flame, were difficult to extinguish with water, and were designed to stick to surfaces to enhance their destructiveness.

Anyway, the book described how they developed the most effective incendiary for use in Japan. Research included testing for the most destructive burn against building materials typically used in Japan. In other words, they didn't want just a fire bomb, but one that would be as destructive as possible in the target area. The book proudly described the effort. I found it somewhat disconcerting--I realized weapons research was a vital task--but still firebombs were pretty nasty weapons and they were making them even worse. In the immediate years following WW II most people did not object to such things. (Many American political and military leaders did not like using firebombs but saw no alternative, it was after all, them or us. The Axis powers certainly freely used them.)

In the PBS series on the Civil War, General Sherman was quoted as saying that he had an army which could kill, butcher, dress, cook, and eat a hog without breaking step. Although his campaign was theoretically not aimed at civilians, in reality the civilians _were_ Sherman's targets: he set out to destroy the South's Command & Control structure, which was the plantation system and the elites who depended on it.

Wars are never fought by gentlemen's rules, with one exception: gentlemen never divulge how many rules they break in order to win. It is only now, almost seventy years later, that World War II veterans are divulging how both sides engaged in torture, murder, and cruelty on a global scale, each knowing that it is the victor which judges the vanquished. In like manner, the veterans of Korea will tell their tales, and those stories will also confirm that war is hell, with the only hope of salvation being to kill more of the enemy than it can stand, and thereby to win the right to say you did it in God's name.

The stories of Vietnam will take longer, not because there is a shortage of records or memories, but because there is an excess of them. Rusty Calley was no different than any other effective field leader, with the exception that he failed to confiscate the cameras and film that carried the images of My Lai to a liberal press that was eager to splash blood across the TV screans of America in order to sell soap to bored suburban housewives. (The question of whether Calley's actions were more or less justified and/or honorable than Sherman's, than Roosevelt's, than Truman's, or than the television networks', is left as an exercise for the reader).

In time, the truth about all wars comes out, and that truth is a searing and frightening look into the darkest reaches of the human soul. That men are vain, violent creatures who are willing to take on themselves the powers of God - the priviege of saying who lives or dies, on a whim - is never in doubt. That the weakest parts of our nature are those we call upon when the strongest are needed is also never in doubt. What is in doubt is whether the species can mature fast enough to avoid destroying itself during a temper tantrum over some line on a map, some line in a religious tome, or some line in the sand.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Somewhere an outfit is offering to ship you a hard drive with an erased file which was wiped once. If you can retrieve the data then you win a prize of some sort. When I read that page the contest had been running for a year with no winners. Regretfully I'm unable to find that page now.

So convenional wisdom might be very wrong.

Tony

Times have changed. Hard drive densities are such that the tricks that used to be employed are now swamped in noise. If anyone can recover truly overwritten sectors these days, they won't enter a contest because it would be a hugely valuable trade secret or intelligence gathering asset.

Well, conventional wisdom in deleting is to toss it in the trash, or do a "quick format". Both of those methods are trivially reversible by anyone. *

This subject - and the ignorance surrounding it - is really astounding.

The assumption that continually sending random pattern write commands to a modern hard drive will overwrite the media with that random pattern has been out of date for many (many) years now as hard drive encoding technology evolved - even the author of one of the original multi-write methods of "wiping" drives tried to point that out that years ago, but it still hasn't stopped people using his original - and now hopelessly outdated - paper as justification for using methods that no longer achieve what they once did.

As modern SSD devices now also do dynamic physical sector remapping (to spread writes through the entire device because they *still* have a finite quantity of write cycles and continually writing to one area would cause premature failure), even randomly writing to these is no guarantee that the physical area that you think you are overwriting is actually being overwritten.

One write pass (bypassing any OS) over the entire storage medium will probably do the job these days, as the encoding techniques will probably randomise the actual written patterns sufficiently to make the previous data unusable no matter what forensic methods may be used in an attempt of recovery.