VANCOUVER -- Journalism students from the University of British Columbia uncovered some secret U.S. military information amid electronic waste shipped abroad, and their findings will air on PBS Tuesday night.
The graduate students and their professor, Peter Klein, visited a slum in Ghana and the world's largest electronic waste dump, in Guiyi, China, to find out what happens to America's electronic trash.
Their research will air on the PBS investigative program Frontline in an episode titled "Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground" on Tuesday night.
Klein is a PBS producer and correspondent. One item the team purchased has caught the interest of the FBI and a U.S. military contractor.
Klein and his team bought a hard drive in Ghana that was originally from U.S. defence contractor Northrop Grumman, according to promotional material from PBS.
"Analysis revealed sensitive information about multimillion-dollar contracts with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security," according to the show's description on www.pbs.org. "The FBI expressed concern about this security breach, and Northrop Grumman has acknowledged it is looking into how its hardware and data ended up in Ghana."
Criminals also scour the hard drives for credit card information, social security numbers and other personal information, according to pbs.org.
The show also will reveal that the recycling of electronic waste pollutes the environment and poisons people who scavenge the e-waste for metal, producing high levels of lead in children and mother's breast milk.
The United States can dump potentially dangerous electronics abroad because the country hasn't ratified an international treaty banning the export of hazardous waste.
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According to a documentary about journalism students at the University of British Columbia tracking electronic waste (e-waste), details of United States defense contracts and confidential military data were left on a donated hard drive which was purchased for US$35 in Ghana.

The purchased hard drive was a donation by Northrop Grumman Corporation, an American aerospace and defense technology company.

The PBS investigative documentary, ''Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground'', tracked what happened to donated or discarded electronics. The journalism students randomly purchased seven hard drives in Tema, Africa. "We plugged them and in and started reading files … They were just sitting there," said Klein. 

As part of the international reporting course the students then submitted the hard drives to Enoch Kwesi Messiah, a computer scientist at Regent University to see if any of the previous owners had erased the data on their hard drives before disposal.

Messiah stated, “I can get your bank numbers and I retrieve all your money from your accounts. If ever somebody gets your hard drive, he can get every information about you from the drive, no matter where it is hidden.” 

The graduate journalism students under Professor Peter Klein travelled to the Korle Lagoon in Accra the capital of Ghana.  Beside the polluted waters is Agbogbloshie, the largest collection of e-waste, useless electronic donations.

“Life is really difficult; they eat here, surrounded by e-waste,” said Mike Anane, a local journalist, “They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine the health implications.” The e-waste is burned and rendered down for copper, iron, or gold from the components.

"It's essentially this charred toxic wasteland," said Blake Sifton, one of the students. "It's incredibly difficult to breathe because there's usually between five and six and seven fires going at any time .… and there's tons and tons of this black, sticky, acrid smoke coming out of them."