Shredding To Avoid A Security Maelstrom

01/14/2009 - Computers and Technology Fear of identity theft and personal security breaches are two of the reasons why shredders have become more prominent in the home. Up until recently, shredding of sensitive documents was exclusive to the business world and governmental departments; until it was stated that there was no law in place to prosecute anyone rummaging through residential waste and taking what they found. With credit card statements and bank transactions forming part of the day to day rubbish that is the result of modern living, the general public got jittery and started investing in document destruction technology.

Although identity theft is a very real prospect, and there has been plenty of media coverage of the average Joe losing a few hundred pounds after someone has accessed their account details; the damage caused by this sort of security breach cannot match the damage that can be caused to companies and government. There are a couple of cases where the simple act of shredding, or more precisely, shredding correctly could have saved the embarrassed faces of CEO's and Government Officials alike. There is also another potential controversial event that will prove suitable media fodder should the documents be fully recovered involving the German secret police.

There are many ways of shredding documents, and it is possible to have them shred to different degrees of destruction. Pummeling, ripping, slicing, puncturing, grinding and disintegrating are all methods employed by document destruction companies to ensure that confidential information remains just that, confidential. There are in fact standards set in place to ensure that the shredding process is sufficient to meet the sensitive nature of the documents.

Shredders that are designed for domestic use have a shredding range of 6 to 12mm and confidential documents have to be broken down into 2mm strips. For more sensitive information, ribbon shredding is not an option, and instead, a cross-shredder is used to create paper particles, also known as chads. Using this technique, commercially sensitive documents are reduced to particles measuring 2mm by 15mm; classified information should be reduced to 0.8 by 12mm and top secret information is confettied to within an inch of its life by being shredded into particles that measure 0.8 by 4mm.

The reasons these standards have been put in place is because it has been known that if the information is worth the effort, then it is possible for documents to be reconstructed. Although it is a painstaking task Iranians pieced together documents that had been destroyed by the US Government during the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy. The recovered information was compiled into a book called Documents from the US Espionage Den, which ultimately prompted the US government to shred more finely. The infamous case of the accountancy scandal involving Enron involved its own shredding scandal, when documents that had been destroyed were recovered and easily reassembled due to the fact that the documents had been fed into the machine the wrong way, neatly cutting out lines of text from classified documents.

In light of this, the average resident has nothing much to fear from inadequate shredding, but companies and businesses should be aware. Sometimes the information contained within documents is more sensitive in nature than originally thought, and has the potential of being interesting to someone out there, ready to either liberate information in the name of freedom, or to create a political maelstrom.