After a U.S. intelligence-gathering aircraft was involved in a mid-air collision off the coast of China four years ago, the crew was unable to erase sensitive information from magnetic data storage systems before making an emergency landing in Chinese territory.

That event underscored the need for simple techniques to provide fail-safe destruction of sensitive data aboard such aircraft. Working with defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp., scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed a series of prototype systems that use special high-strength permanent magnets to quickly erase a wide variety of storage media.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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