I sat down at the computer in my office and gave the commands for erasing all data. In case you don’t already know this (it’s been in the news from time to time, perhaps most notably when White House staffer Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s cover-up attempt over the Iran-Contra affair got tripped up), simply giving "Delete" commands doesn’t truly erase data from a computer’s hard drive. Instead, it just changes the name of each file to simply mark it as having been deleted; those items no longer show up in searches, but they’re still stored on the drive, and they can be recovered.