I went to an information security symposium today, and the keynote speaker was a digital forensics expert, the director of the Defense Cyber Crime Institute.
Let me just say this... WOW. If you've ever done anything (really) wrong, and you were stupid enough to store something about it on electronic media, unless you do a couple things, you are really screwed. These guys can get just about any piece of data off of just about any sort of destroyed media. They showed us examples of someone having krinkled and then cut a floppy disk into multiple pieces, and even though they didn't find all the pieces in the trash they were able recover enough incriminating data from the fragments to put the guy away for life. There were many other extremely impressive examples.
Basically, AFTER using a quality multi-pass secure deletion program like BCWipe to erase your media, you should just burn it or melt it down, or otherwise make it no longer remotely distinguishable as former electronic media. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure they're going to be able to get it, in which case, as I mentioned, you're screwed.
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