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I have invested most of every wakeful hour in the last 25 years in front of a computer. My company bought one of the very first useful desktop PC's ever, the 1983 model IBM PC XT, followed closely in 1985 by our purchase of a second PC, the IBM PC AT 3270 with terminal emulation, a faster, smaller futuristic gem.
I quickly migrated all of my work onto the near-paperless infrastructure we built, teaching myself to use popular word processing and relational database building software. I taught myself to to write SQL programs to extract data in any form I desired, and quickly took on writing programs that generated linear and multiple regression, as well as chi-square analyses. By 1987, I was a whiz at analyzing large volumes of data. We hired data entry operators to enter ever paper record we had on hand or in storage, some dating back to my grandfather's shipments of bauxite and coal in 1947. By the time we finished electronically collecting our history, our mainframe computer held no fewer than 250,000 records of company transactions, with every field coded and given values. We became so proficient at analyzing every aspect of our business processes that we reduced our operating costs by nearly 60%, because we took the early leap, and gambled on those investments in PC's.
Today, all but retired from that business, I still find myself in front of either of my 2 PC's most of every day (one is a Media Center for great access to giant screen TV, Internet, & Radio). But I have amassed, over the last 5 years, no less than 6 terabytes of data, including video footage, photos, emails, word documents, PDF's, music (mp3, wav, CD), and a few recorded TV shows. I have all this stored on four (4) internal hard drives and four (4) external hard drives. Additionally, I have everything deemed critical backed up on DVD's. The data, family videos, travel photos, etc., spans more than three (3) decades.
Now, we know the Bin Laden Family's history with the Bush Family spans far more time than the time span of my records do. And Dick Cheney has quite a long history within the world of the Bush/Bin Laden relationships, and within the world of Pakistan's recent leader, Pervez Musharraf.
I would have to believe that Osama Bin Laden had some of the same type files and data that I did. I'm guessing even the most hardened criminal has a soft spot for his or her children, mother, and maybe a favorite sister or brother. Bin Laden probably had some photos, some video clips, and letters from Aunt Salome.
But Osama Bin Laden didn't have as many hard drives as he did to store family memorabilia. No. Bin Laden had important data, and he had a plan to use it if required.
I am almost certain Bin Laden used some of those hard drives to "back-up" others, and even that would suggest that Bin Laden was not lying around waiting for the Grim Reaper.
I can only guess what events filled Bin Laden's final 4 or 5 minutes. But I would bet he did not destroy any of the data from the hard drives. And I may go as far as to suggest he was certain the U.S. Navy Seals were able to secure every bit of media completely intact.
And so, as I learned in the early 1980's, hard drive searches can be executed very quickly; and I learned you really cannot completely delete files from hard drives without some fairly complex software.
But then, why would Bin Laden have that many hard drives if his plan was to delete files?
Rest well, Dick Cheney and George Bush, while we await the results of those searches.
