Hacker News Reader

Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

The practical value here isn't in banknotes, it's in shredded classified documents. That's the elephant in the room. And it's good for advancing pure research.

View on HN

>Seven Years After Embassy Seizure, Iran Still Prints U.S. Secrets

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/10/world/7-years-after-embas...

https://archive.ph/EVbpX

>Among the most interesting papers are shredded secret documents pieced back together by the militants that detail attempts of the Central Intelligence Agency to recruit high-level Iranian officials, ayatollahs and exiles, foreign journalists and diplomats either as paid or ''unwitting'' agents in the months after the revolution in February 1979.

I’m surprised they could put them back together. When I shredded top secret documents in the navy when I was a kid, what came out into the bin outside was effectively powder. Those shredders could shred a broomstick! Literally, I shredded a broomstick once, it didn’t even slow down. They were tall so you had to climb on a ladder to reach the top, and they had a massive electric motor that spun a very heavy rotor very fast that would powder the documents. You threw multiple reams worth of paper at once.

It does seem a colossal failure that a potentially overrun location would not have the real industrial shredders and instead relies upon the consumer style.

or you know, a small fireplace. Tehran sees cool enough overnight temperatures 8-9 months a year to even get some value from the heat.

Given this sample:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder#/media/File:Shr...

It doesn't look like the embassy was even using a cross-cut shredder.

Oh I guess it was a few decades before I was in the military, maybe they didn’t have the best shredders back then.

By 1990 everything classified was cross-cut and presumably treated from there after pickup.

According to https://www.whitakerbrothers.com/pages/paper-shredders-secur... it was already up to p6-7, at least for everything I saw.

There would always be signs posted warning against wearing a tie while using the shredder.

Shredding seems the wrong tool if one wants to dispose classified documents

Why not incinerating, dissolving in acid, grinding into a fine powder, or something like that?

Also questioned myself.

My pet theory is big companies first shred and after send to be burned (or recycled).

Plus a shredding machine us safer than a fire device.

Cynically, if your insurance company says "4mm cross cut and a paper trail to prove it was done", then that's what you do. Why try harder?

But yes, paper that's shredded by a specialist paper-shredding company is then typically baled up and sent for recycling.

I compost all of my sensitive information that arrives by mail.

And whenever I need to dispose of something I can’t compost, like an old drivers license, I cut it into pieces and drip feed the pieces into the garbage over the course of a few months.

Call me paranoid but I think there will be a cottage industry in sifting through garbage once this tech gets mature enough!

Considering all of my confidential information has already been leaked by some tech entity or another, yeah a bit paranoid. Concentrated data is juicier than mining trash.

Your trash bags are ripped open and co-mingled as they're sorted through by workers as it zips by on a conveyor belt.

You're being very, very excessively paranoid doing anything more than just cutting it into a piece or two across the ID number.

Lol! I do that with drivers licenses too. I laugh at myself as I do it.

Ugh, I had to get a failed bank card replaced at a branch once and had to train the clerk to cut through the chip, not just the magstripe.

> I cut it into pieces and drip feed the pieces into the garbage over the course of a few months.

That seems like both more effort, and potentially less effective, than just burning them?

Putting it on paper in the first place is a big mistake because it probably isn't encrypted, it has probably been printed (printers are a bit scary in terms of security and privacy), there's cameras everywhere including in every pocket, and documents are easily duped, exfiltrated and observed, and you would likely have no easily-followed log of any of that. You also have to trust whoever does your disposal/recycling, and where there's people, there's dishonesty. Hence "zero trust" as a concept.

To me "zero trust" = sadness. Can't/won't do it.

Interesting! What about it makes you sad? I'm happier than ever because I don't need to worry anymore about if something is safe, because I know it is safe.

Having sensitive data compromised would make me extremely sad.

Constant vigilance and suspicion erodes my soul.

In many cases incineration is the standard, using so-called burn bags.

or just shredding into a tank of water and pressing it into pulp

That's a different problem. In the banknote, case the document is known in advance.

Each banknote will have a unique serial number. So at least some part of the document will not be known in advance. Though serial numbers are well structured so you can take advantage of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com