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Confidential Police Documents Found In Confetti At Macy's Parade

Posted by samzenpus on from the putting-it-all-together dept.

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."

5 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. How to shred by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:How to shred by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or just feed the paper into the incinerator in the basement that helps to heat your building.

      It is surprisingly difficult to burn large quantities of office-quality paper and ensure that nothing is left except ashes.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    2. Re:How to shred by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Informative

      But that won't cover stuff printed in portrait format. Shredding in only one direction is a bad idea.

      Hell, my home shredder, like most of them nowadays, is a cross shredder, which means it's cutting in both directions at once. That ends up making fairly small confetti-like pieces.

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Shredder models by Firethorn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    I don't read AC A human right
  3. Re:I call BS on this by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.