Amy Davidson, writing in the New Yorker, wonders how those 92 tapes were actually destroyed.
Does the C.I.A.
use VHS, in which case it’s a matter of an agent pulling out the tape
and putting the lit end of his cigarette to it, watching the plastic
melt as the credits roll? Or is there a hammer and a pile of shattered
DVDs somewhere? If it’s all digital, is it really destroyed, or buried
on a hard drive somewhere, painted over with pixels?
I'm not sorry to miss seeing the contents of those tapes. Come to that, would I have wanted to know that earth just missed being hit by an asteroid the other day?
Sky & Telescope said it “buzzed” the earth—and astronomers never saw it coming. So things could be worse.
