Today I managed to walk around the stupefying WTC disaster site for half an hour, doing what a serious professional would be doing: taking dozens of careful photographs of the ruins. Then an NYC cop asked to see my authorization to be photographing a crime scene. I said nobody told me not to. He said come with me, and told a captain who asked how the fuck did you get in here. I said I just walked in, nobody stopped me. Captain checked my ID and my tale about safety-surveying the neighborhood as a volunteer, and said escort this guy off the scene. Then I was handed over to the State Police who had me repeat my reason for being there, took my fancy digital camera, looked at the photos and bygod erased all of them. Then I was handed over to the National Guard who is in charge of perimeter security, and I again had to explain that I just walked in, that there were no barriers and no guards the way I came. While that was happening two dozen victim families were escorted to the site to stare at the devastation, carrying flowers, weeping, holding each other, some stumbling, looking as if walking into hell -- which it truely is. Shit. I got my name put in a database and a warning to not come back or face arrest. I said thank you and did not even for a second think to say fuck off for which you may shit on me. Now the help I need is how to recover the erased images from the Compact Flash memory chip. Norton's unerase detects no remnants of the JPG images. I would really appreciate pointers on how to reclaim the images: they show godawful stuff I've not seen published anywhere else. No human remains as far as I can tell just dumbfounding acres of what used to be and the giant machines and tiny workers trying to untangle it. If anybody can tell me how to get the images restored I'll be immensely grateful -- technique or a program to buy. And I'll put the images on the Web as soon as reborn. They are high res images, 1MB or so each, and should be gruesomely spectacular, if only they can be unerased. Crime scene indeed. What I admired was the grandstand set up by the Port Authority for distinguished visitors to survey the spectacle and be televised saying how awful it is and how much money is need to rebuild New York and what must be done to prevent this ever happening again. That grandstand looked like the crime scene to me.