[ale] erasing ext3 filesystems securely

[John Wells]

Guys,

After letting shred run for 20+ hours on the drive I plan to return to
Circuit City, I finally bothered to read the man page (doh) and found the
following relevant excerpt:
----
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the
filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do
things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption.
The following are examples of filesystems on which shred is not effective:

* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with

    AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)
----


So...that's down the tubes.  Trying to google for the subject line and
other  combinations hasn't turned up any definitive sources either.

I don't need CIA level deletion here, but I would like to be reasonably 
certain that noone could restore my data after the drive is returned.

Is there a utility out there that can handle ext3 deletion?

Thanks, as always.

John