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Confidential Police Documents Found In Confetti At Macy's Parade
cstacy writes "The Nassau County (New York) Police Department is 'very concerned' about reports that shreds of police documents (with social security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, license plate numbers, incident reports, and more) rained down as confetti in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The documents also unveiled the identities of undercover officers, including their SSNs and bank information, according to WPIX-TV. Macy's has no idea how this happened, as they use commercial, colored confetti, not shredded paper."
I think you'd need to ensure your sensitive documents were pulped, rather than simply shredded. Much harder to piece together paper machet'
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The journalist uses the word "confetti" which does not mean "long strips of paper that were not crosscut shredded". Every shredder I've seen for the last decade has been a crosscut shredder instead of the old style. There's one in this office not ten feet from me that does crosscut shredding, and my Dad has one in his office too. These are the ordinary models that anyone can buy. So, were these police documents ribbons instead of confetti? The article doesn't say. Yet another proud day for journalism.
Also, not a proud day for reading comprehension. TFA states "shredded police documents mixed in with confetti". Other articles have photos and videos of the strips of paper which have complete lines of text.
It was not a cross-cut shredder. The police reports evidently came in "strips."
See this article.
Heh... I'd just go with a high security shredder approved by the NSA. Chops your average 10 pt font letter into at least 4 pieces.
I don't read AC A human right
Shredding paper reduces average paper fiber length and thus also reduces the value of the paper as a recycled material. Also makes the paper take up more volume in transport. Additionally, if you don't trust your recycler to securely handle your intact paper, shredding the paper before you give it to them is a minimal improvement for the same reason shredding the paper before throwing it all over new york city wasn't very secure, and there was far more randomization there than shredding paper into a bucket.
So there's significant practical reasons to not shred the paper before shipping it out - increases costs, reduces value, minimal security improvement.
paintball
TFA is entirely worthless; but the stuff showing up on Google images for this little fiasco shows strip-cut material that hasn't even been fed into the shredder in the correct direction(so the strips tend to include entire lines, rather than mere fragments) unless our dear intertubes are lying, somebody did an atypically bad shredding job, even by the standards of small-business-who-buys-their-shredding-through-staples standards.
Well, that's what happens when you outsource a significant privacy-related concern to someone outside of your internal domain: they might not shred it well enough or finely enough so that it is unrecoverable. Just look at the DARPA Shredder Challenge to see how much can be recovered from shredded documents.
Also, see the movie Argo for another example of the carpet-weaving approach to unshredding strip-shredded documents when you've got enough manpower.
Good point. It's all too easy to spin pre-shredded documents to look like your docs are being shredded when the real docs are being transferred to a safe storage box to sell to corporate spies and ID theives. A document scanner could also just as easily be installed between the feeder and the cutting blades to record data milliseconds before shredding. Printers and copiers are a major security concern as well since most of today's models will save digital copies of recently printed documents in onboard memory. If you have secrets worth shredding it's probably best not to outsource the task to a guy with a truck earning minimum wage. Same goes to outsourcing your IT department.