Confidential Police Documents Found In Confetti At Macy's Parade 180
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."
How to shred (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
It is surprisingly difficult to burn large quantities of office-quality paper and ensure that nothing is left except ashes.
Re:How to shred (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It does wonders when your information isn't worth much. It is like having a lock on your crappy car. Why would someone steal it when there are so many better locked cars or flat out unlocked cars available nearby?
Security is relative.
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If you shred it and let it flutter down in to the incinerator it would probably burn quite vigorously.
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Or the updrafts from the flames would keep the little pieces fluttering and carry them away before they even get close to the flames.
Re:How to shred (Score:5, Interesting)
it would probably burn quite vigorously.
Sounds like a job for MythBusters
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Blend the ashes in water. Cross shredded, burnt and pulped in water. No one is recovering that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also it would make far, far more sense to shred everything into horizontal strips. What's the point in shredding at all if you shred neatly into readable lines?
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vertical*
Obviously.
Argh.
1979 called (Score:3)
Apparently it did take a few months to reassemble all the shredded paperwork in Tehran though so it's still a bit more than a "keep out" sign designed to stop the honest.
Re:How to shred (Score:5, 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.
Re:How to shred (Score:5, Funny)
...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.
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Or, given that they're the police, have a portable service come and shred the paper down to pulp. There are truck fleets designed to do this.
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Re:How to shred (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Precisely.
Some of us old timers remember when we heated with wood and/or coal furnaces. You could have all the fuel you wanted, you could have a nice draft going through the firebox - and the fire would still burn out if not tended occasionally. You needed to grab the shaker handle, give it a couple good shakes to knock the ashes into the ash bin, then open the door and poke the mass of smouldering stuff in the firebox. Depending on conditions, you may or may not throw another log, or another chunk of co
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Re:How to shred (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... no. Our air conditioning costs (even in mid-winter) are already high enough without adding more heat.
OK, so what about a heat-engine powered AC unit? (Besides, you know, not everyone lives in a jungle.)
Re:How to shred (Score:4, Funny)
That'd be hilarious. I can already imagine the business justification: "we need to install a heater so we can power the cooler because we heat too much when it's cold outside."
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(Besides, you know, not everyone lives in a jungle.)
I used to work for an ISP in New York. The ACs always ran. Although maybe outside air exchange could have prevented that a few days a year,
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You can use your incinerator to run absorption cycle chillers, then. :)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
Re:How to shred (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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we imported a HIPPApotamus...!
That's HIPAApotamus - as in Health Information Portability and Accountability Act
By the way, why you were modded as "Interesting" instead of "Funny" is beyond me.
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That's what surprised me. I assumed that the assertion that we'd provided our printers with law degrees would be absurd on its face. Maybe slashdot knows something about the falling admissions standards of degree mills that I don't.
(though, in theory, a multifunction printer whose postscript interpreter has access to scanned documents should, probably with a major RAM upgrade, be capable of taking a bar exam if sent an appropriately structured postscript file...)
I got two words for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How to shred (Score:4, Informative)
The best answer is to shred the documents with a proper cross-cut shredder, pulp the shreds and then recycle the pulp into new paper things. :)
And its good for the environment too
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They might have missed as step as they recycled the paper as confetti.
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Ideally, the police would adopt this new tech called computer and stop using paper altogether.
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Can't. The dept. hasn't had room in the budget for a computer since 1975. And what with viruses and hackers and too many idiots who don't understand cyber security, using a computer would lead to even bigger leaks of secret information.
Shredder models (Score:5, 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.
Re:Shredder models (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of them out there. We tend to not replace stuff like that as long as it's still working and authorized. 1mm x 5mm is still considered acceptable (1/32 x 5/32) for the highest security. 10-15 sheets sounds a bit high even for a 1/2 hp motor at that small of a shred paper unless it chews relatively very slowly. We get 5-6 sheets here at work, and like I said, it'll chop the average printed character into at least 4 pieces, even at 10 pt.
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For added security / deliciousness, I like to take the shreds from a home shredder and... feed 'em to the worms [wikipedia.org]! Then feed the worm poop to the garden veggies, then feed the veggies to the people. If they can recover SSNs from the resulting people poop, they can have 'em!
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Most entertaining thread I've seen on /. for a while
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Had I mod points I would have modded you troll+. A new ranking that acknowledges the ability to get someone to read, follow 0 point threads, and laugh at the same time. I only saw your post, had to open and follow the parents back up...The human brain is an endless source of word combinations.
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What idiotic police department lists tax and banking information in a report containing a list of undercover police officers?
Maybe the payroll department?
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1-2 years your up a rank and out, cover lost for ever.
The real fun is for the federal and state task force members.
They need 'day' jobs going back decades and real paperwork to stay undercover for 10's of years.
A tame utility company sends out a normal payslip while a person spends all weekends and parts of the week getting deeper in sensitive political activities.
In t
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Stop reading 1984 as fiction/entertainment, and instead read it as a how-to manual, and your questions will be answered.
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Maybe this was another type of list entirely. It may not have come from the police department. The fact that it made it into the confetti is odd. Perhaps whomever made the list wanted to get rid of it in a way that would not be noticed. If so, they miscalculated.
And I was thinking the reverse - if we believe Macy's claim that they buy commercial confetti (and I haven't seen anything to say otherwise yet), then this might be someone who wanted it to be found, but not traced back to them.
We still do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Throw crap all over to celebrate what.... yay we're job creators! someone has to pick all this shit up!
Skyfall? (Score:3)
Or just a cheap way of deposing old paper(s)?
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"Yes, those documents have been securely destroyed". It's good to know that it isn't just IT that does security theater.
I call BS on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I call BS on this (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Nassau county police is not the nypd
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/nypd-spying-new-brunswick-muslim-surveillance-new-jersey_n_1701340.html [huffingtonpost.com]
Re:I call BS on this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I call BS on this (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I'm pretty sure that the ones who bring containerized/tractor-trailer-installed shredders to your site and allow you to watch the sweet, sweet, destruction are probably not lying, since they have little ability to resist trivial inspection. Anybody else, for reasons totally unrelated to having to do real work, rather than 'ensuring secure document lifecycle management' by watching huge shredders get their shred on, I heartily distrust.
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Just saying.
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Re:I call BS on this (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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
That's why I mentioned interleaving colored paper.
A document scanner could also just as easily be installed between the feeder and the cutting blades to record data milliseconds before shredding.
Good catch. Didn't think of that. So essentially do the same thing we do with unwipeable HDDs: disassemble and destroy platters & solid state cache in-house. (ie shred and burn paper in-house)
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Around here they have shredder trucks that drive around the office buildings once every so often. They have a big bin that pops out on the side, and they have you dump your own documents/items in so they don't have to touch them. Then, there is a viewing window on the back so you can see the piles of ~1cm x ~1cm bits that come out from whatever you just threw in. Unless they're using misdirection and mirrors, I think that's pretty secure.
I honestly don't know what they do with the bits, but several building
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Yes, otherwise they are in breach of contract.
But, as a customer, you first have to prove that. But I guess, Nassau PD now has that proof... It will be interesting to watch whether they'll now sue their document disposal company...
Not slicing on-site... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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It must not be a good shred job if the stuff can be easily put back together.
Consumer level shredders can just use strips about 3/8 of an inch wide. Next level up are some crosscuts which can 1 1/2 inches. From there, you get 1/8" wide cuts of varying crosscuts.
For serious shredding, you get a level 4-6 shredder, or at least a FACTA-compliant one. Those put out pieces small enough that they are more of the size of large glitter, not confetti.
I'm dubious about this too. Most government (city/state/Federa
Re:I call BS on this (Score:5, 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.
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more likely someone did it on purpose. nice leak.
Re:I call BS on this (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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It was not a cross-cut shredder. The police reports evidently came in "strips."
See this article [wpix.com].
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They do make non-crosscut shredders (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
DARPA: Reconstructing Cross-cut shred docs: (Score:2)
The problem is when they might not shred it well enough or finely enough so that it is unrecoverable. Just look at the DARPA Shredder Challenge [wikipedia.org] to see how much can be recovered from shredded documents. The last challenge involved multiple cross-cut shredded documents mixed together.
.
Also, see the movie for another example of the carpet-weaving approach to unshredding strip-shredded documents when you've got enough m [wikipedia.org]
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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?
This document was shreded by Occam's Razor.
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First of all, I believe Macy's on this.
The three hour parade starts at 77th St and ends at 34th Street.
8,000 marchers.
Including ten marching bands
Clowns. Dancers. Massive floats, outsized, peanut-shaped vehicles and other four-wheeled curiosities.
2 million pedestrians lining the route.
I find it hard to believe that shredded bits of paper are going to survive such a trampling in recognizable form. Harder still to believe that anyone could have collected and reassembled enough pieces of the puzzle to make a story like this seem credible.
Macy's [huffingtonpost.com]
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WTH? (Score:2)
Re:WTH? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Every shredder I've seen for the last decade has been a crosscut shredder instead of the old style.
The shredded paper strips [newsday.com] look like what comes out of the low-end Champion shredder I bought at Office Depot last year. Including the slightly serrated edges. That thing just cuts paper into 8mm strips. As a security device, it's not much.
(I bought one to use as a paper slitter to make 8mm paper tape to be printed on by antique Model 14 Teletypes. It's not a great paper slitter, but running adding machine rolls though it made enough tape to get the Teletypes working.)
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Every shredder I've seen for the last decade has been a crosscut shredder instead of the old style.
The shredded paper strips [newsday.com] look like what comes out of the low-end Champion shredder I bought at Office Depot last year. Including the slightly serrated edges. That thing just cuts paper into 8mm strips. As a security device, it's not much.
Given the "artistic" layout of the strips in that photo, I'd guess that that was some Newsday photographer's idea of a dramatic reenactment, rather than an actual handful of the strips in question.
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The cynic in me thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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]
Umm, police at fault (Score:2)
SO, they didn't destroy the documents, and now they're upset about it. Maybe, just maybe, they need to do a better job of destroying sensitive documents.
This has to be B*s* (Score:2)
All it has to be is printed in landscape (Score:2)
If you put a page printed in fine print in landscape, then a lot of text would be legible if put through a strip shredder. Even a cross cut shredder might not be enough to prevent the release of useable data in that case.
So the problem is a cheap strip shredder somewhere in a police station, and someone treating the shredded paper thoughtlessly.
(Not that this story might not be false, but it also could be true.)
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You might remember that the students in Iran did just that after the coup in 1979. They sat down with a few tons of shredded paper and played it like a huge puzzle.
Sure, it takes a LOT of time and a LOT of work, but you really think the mob has a problem with either?
Cheap solutions (Score:2, Interesting)
Need a shredder?
too much trouble to do a requisition and wait 6 months
go to Wal-Mart
Buy cheap
submit 'expense'
much easier.
Too lazy to empty the trash into the confidential bag?
Dump it out the window on the way out the door.
City will clean it up
Didn't have to 'walk the donut'
gain a pound for retirement
Anyone curious about Motive? (Score:3)
Re:Anyone curious about Motive? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm pondering which villain from Batman would do this sort of thing.
Anyone considered it was deliberate? (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially if the organizer of the parade claims they use commercial confetti, and bluntly, why shouldn't they, considering that it's one thing less to think about and it most certainly isn't one of the big numbers on the bill.
Can anyone see a snitch working in the cleaning crew responsible for cleaning out the shredded papers using the parade to hand some info out to his friends? He cannot access sensitive material, of course, and if he took home a few cubic meters of shredded paper someone might wonder what's going on, but grabbing it and dumping it out during the parade, nobody would notice.
All you need is a man in the cleaning crew for after the parade. Thinking of it ... all you really need to get this rolling is a company specializing in cleaning... Anyone looked into this?
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That's what makes them so funny. Hey, why not make a movie script out of it, what would be the next sequel to Die Hard?
"Based on a true story"
Scrap paper (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Darpa Shredder Challenge & outsourcing+unshred (Score:4, Informative)
Also, see the movie Argo [wikipedia.org] for another example of the carpet-weaving approach to unshredding strip-shredded documents when you've got enough manpower.
Hmm... (Score:2)
If I had access to confidential police records, including undercover cops, and wanted to sell it, I might arrange a distribution method such as this.
It's a good thing that nobody with significant amounts of money has an interest in determining the identities of undercover cops.
Stop printing so damn much! (Score:2)
Shredding company? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
After reading this article... (Score:2)
...by Sarah Stillman [newyorker.com], I've come to the conclusion that cops are basically stupid.
They did use confetti paper... (Score:2)
Macy's did use confetti. Keep in mind, however, that they are a corporation and a corporation's primary purpose is survival, followed by maximum profit.
Perhaps the confetti they bought was from the cheapest source, and said source was not verified to be the most reliable one. Oops?