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."

Comments

How to shred

[Nefarious Wheel]

I think you'd need to ensure your sensitive documents were pulped, rather than simply shredded. Much harder to piece together paper machet'

Re:How to shred

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I think you'd need to ensure your sensitive documents were pulped, rather than simply shredded. Much harder to piece together paper machet'

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

Re:How to shred

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think you'd need to ensure your sensitive documents were pulped, rather than simply shredded. Much harder to piece together paper machet'

It's a question of volume. Once you start shoving serious quantities of paper, you should really look into sending all your printers and copiers to law school, and retooling the UIs and print drivers so that all printing automatically takes place in the context of attorney-client privilege.

Thanks to the magic of inexpensive ethernet-attached printers and online degree mills, all the printers that the C-levels and above use are doctors as well as lawyers, and we imported a HIPPApotamus to guard the filing cabinets. It doesn't get more secure than that!

Re:How to shred

[whoever57]

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.

Re:How to shred

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Which is why such documents are shredded and then incinerated. I used to work for a bank, there's nothing difficult about it at all. The only thing people should take away from this article is that shredding documents really doesn't do much (if anything) to keep your data private.

Re:How to shred

[Anonymous Coward]

Some idiot kid incinerated our plastic trash cans. Ordinary trash and recycleable trash cans burnt down to the wheels. The paper trash can was only burnt one third down, and the paper itself stacked/compressed inside rather compactly was mostly untouched. I suppose that the problem is getting the oxygen where it counts.

Re:How to shred

[craigminah]

Looking at the size and length of the shredded documents, it looks like the police used a $29 home shredder from Staples. They should spend a few more dollars and get a shredder that can reduce their paper to dust or at least small bits instead of long strips.

Re:How to shred

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:How to shred

[Sentrion]

...They should spend a few more dollars and get a shredder that can reduce their paper to dust or at least small bits instead of long strips.

You must be one of those tax-and-spend liberals. The solution is to shutdown the police department, reduce firearm regulations, and allow the invisible hand of the free market to decide who can get away with crime.

Re:How to shred

[sl4shd0rk]

it would probably burn quite vigorously.

Sounds like a job for MythBusters

We still do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Throw crap all over to celebrate what.... yay we're job creators! someone has to pick all this shit up!

I call BS on this

[multiben]

First of all, I believe Macy's on this. Why would you try to save a few bucks by using recycled documents? They're not a pet store. Secondly, confetti is usually pretty small, so who was walking around piecing tiny bits of paper together in the middle of the parade? I guess it's possible but the whole thing just smells like your standard internet myth.

Re:I call BS on this

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unless the evidence just *magically* disappears from the hands of the people who collected it and took pictures at the parade, we pretty much have to accept that shredded documents did end up getting tossed around like confetti.

That done, we get into the question of where in the chain from NYPD filing cabinet to document disposal company to recycler, to party supplier some deeply underprocessed documents made it into the final product...

Does NYPD not even cross-cut onsite? Fuck, my workplace does that(paper, HDD, and tape) and we don't exactly have people who infiltrate the mob for a living. Did the 'secure document lifecycle solutions' vendor cut some serious corners? Is there a bulk confetti supplier who is cutting the product with material from the shred stream in order to lower processing costs?

Re:I call BS on this

[PCM2]

In addition, I have a cross-cut shredder at my home. I've looked at the bits of paper that come out of it, and it's nigh impossible to get any meaningful information off of them -- certainly not "Pete Jones is an undercover police officer, yes that Pete Jones, the one who buys his cocaine at the Acme Bar, the guy with the weird mustache." And mine is pretty old, too. They have ones that slice and dice the paper much finer than mine.

So, while I'm not saying it's impossible that somebody picked up some confetti at a parade and realized to their horror that it contained sensitive, confidential information; but if that did in fact happen, it was clearly an intentional act by someone.

Cue the dramatic organ music... and now let's start talking Occam's Razor. Do we believe this story, really?

Re:I call BS on this

[guruevi]

You really think the 'commercial' document shredder companies do what they say? No, they take the paper or hard disks or whatever off your hands and now your manager has a false sense of security.

What does the shredder company do: they try to make money on both ends. Selling large amounts of recycled paper as confetti paper is a pretty good deal as a) they get paid for it and b) the confetti company doesn't have to pay for brand new paper.

Do you really think the hard disks you gave them will get shredded as they say? No, it will get taken apart and the individual pieces (rare earth magnets, platters etc.) will get recycled wherever it is cheapest.

Re:I call BS on this

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

The cynic in me thought...

[arielCo]

"It landed on her shoulder," Finkelstein said, "and it says 'SSN' and it's written like a Social Security number, and we're like, 'That's really bizarre.'"

Finkelstein, a Tufts University freshman, said he and his friends were concerned and picked up more confetti that had fallen around them.

[cynical]
They were lucky not to be charged for "illegal appropriation of classified government documents" or something like that, like that poor sod who bought a used computer, found kiddie porn in it and duly reported it.
[/cynical]

I got two words for you

[lsllll]

Cross Shredder

Shredder models

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:Shredder models

[LoRdTAW]

Back in the 80's (sometime after the Iran-Contra affair) my grandfather was contracted by a government contractor to design and stamp the cutter wheels used in secure paper shredders. Basically the shredder must produce paper shards no larger than 1/32 inches (0.79mm) wide and 1/8 inches (3.17mm) long. Pretty much dust comes out of the bottom of this thing. The wheels were stamped from big heavy rolls of steel stock and then heat treated. I can still remember the constant loud chatter from the 20 ton OBI press as it stamped out one cutter after another 6 days a week. It has a rather powerful 1/2 HP motor with a gear reduction head and a chain drive to the shredder mechanism. The frame was heavy 1/4 thick steel plate and the unit was housed in a nice heavy duty steel box. It does have limits on how many papers it can handle at once, something like 10 - 15 8.5x11 sheets at once before it jams.

We have a complete unit that was used as our paper shredder for years until it became too bulky. It weighs close to 80 lbs and must be suspended on a stand over a bag or bin, it doesn't fit under a desk. We also have a complete mechanism with chain and motor as well as a half assembled unit. We still have the shredder, but we now use one of those cheap staples bought cross cut shredders, does the job nicely. Those shredders were built to last and I bet there might be some still in operation at various government agencies.

They do make non-crosscut shredders

[Sycraft-fu]

Not saying there's any validity to this story (it sounds like BS to me) but you can get shredders that shred to various standards. Fellowes sells shredders that are strip cut, cross cut, and micro cut (more or less makes powder). The reason is because the more intense the cut, the less amount of paper a given size of motor can handle. For example take three of their shredders, all with the same basic build and model number. The strip cut version can do 21 sheets at a time, the cross cut 14, the micro cut 10. Same motor, same general construction, only difference is the blade assembly.

It has nothing to do with size either. You can find large ones that are strip cut. Fellowes has a 35 sheet strip cut commercial model they sell (costs about $4k). The more you want the paper cut up, the more blades you have to have, thus the more resistance, thus the less it can handle at once.

As such businesses may choose the higher capacity, but less secure, shredders for some documents. They also cost less to buy.

That's also why micro cut shredders have never become all that popular. Their cost goes up again because of the more blades and they can't handle a lot at once.

Scrap paper

[MichaelSmith]

Police in my state got into trouble once for printing out license and registration data and using the printouts as scrap paper in their front office, so if they had to write something down for a member of the public they might get somebody else's details on the back.

Shredding company?

[Mr. Freeman]

Here's my theory:
NYPD decides, as many businesses do, to contract with an company for shredding. They ship their confidential documents off to this company and they get shredded. This way the NYPD doesn't have to buy a bunch of shredders and deal with internal shredder compliance.

The company doing the shredding decides that they're going to make an extra couple bucks and sell their shredded documents as "confetti". Someone in the purchasing office for the confetti company isn't looking to closely and makes the purchase. The shredded documents are shipped and then mixed into the confetti.