But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is the one the business journalists are buzzing about: where the Times got a fair portion of its information in this investigative article. It came from a laptop in the possession of artist-film maker Nancy Cohen. Here’s where she got it:

The friend told her he had happened upon the laptop discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building. E-mail messages for Mr. Tourre continued streaming into the device, but Ms. Cohen said she had ignored them until she heard Mr. Tourre’s name in news reports about the S.E.C. case. She then provided the material to The Times.

This is amazing. Felix Salmon at Reuters speculates that the Times, Cohen, or her friend may have hacked this laptop to get those e-mails. Anyone reading this post has some experience with computers and e-mail addresses. Most computers are password protected, but all e-mail addresses are password protected. Passwords are also often changed, sometimes on a mandatory, set schedule. It’s theoretically possible that this laptop was not password protected, that the password was stored in a browser or file, and that it remained unchanged during this time. If all those stars aligned, then the Times has incredible luck.

There are lessons here too — even for those of us who do not work for Goldman Sachs. First, secure your computer. While a good hacker might be able to breach any system, your average reporter or artist cannot. Even if you don’t find yourself the target of an SEC investigation, you probably don’t want your e-mails or other personal information snooped through by someone who stumbles upon your old computer.

Of course, there’s another way to avoid this: destroy your old hard drives. Whenever I throw away an old computer, I take pull out the hard drive and take a hammer to it — even if there’s nothing particularly exciting to find, other than some great philosophy papers on Aristotle from college. While some truly gifted computer forensics expert might be able to reconstruct a demolished hard drive or obtain glimmers of information from its parts, the chances of that occurring are quite slim.

via Lessons From NY Times Investigative Journalism: Destroy Your Old Computers – Daniel Indiviglio – Business – The Atlantic.