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Paper shredders are used to cut Paper into very fine strips or tiny paper chips. Government organizations, businesses, and private individuals use shredders to destroy private, Confidential , or sensitive documents. Privacy experts often recommend that individuals shred bills, credit card and bank account statements, and other documents that could be used by thieves to commit Fraud or Identity Theft . HISTORY The first paper shredder is credited to prolific inventor Abbot Augustus Low of Horseshoe, New York. His patent for a “waste paper receptacle” to offer an improved method of disposing of waste paper was filed on February 2, 1909 and received the U.S. patent number 929,960 on August 31, 1909. Low’s invention was never manufactured, however. Adolf Ehinger's paper shredder, based on a hand-crank pasta maker, was manufactured in 1935 in Germany. Supposedly Adolf needed to shred his anti-Nazi propaganda to avoid the inquiries of the authorities. Ehinger later marketed his shredders to government agencies and financial institutions converting from hand-crank to electric motor. Ehinger's company, EBA Maschinenfabrik, manufactured the first cross-cut paper shredders in 1959 and continues to do so to this day as EBA Krug & Priester GmbH & Co. in Balingen . The U.S. embassy in Iran used strip-cut paper shredders to reduce paper pages to strips before the embassy was taken over in 1979 (not entirely successfully, see below the section on "unshredding"). After Colonel Oliver North told Congress that he used a Schleicher Intimus 007 S cross-cut model to shred Iran-Contra documents, sales for that company increased nearly 20 percent in 1987. {Link without Title} Until the 1980s, it was rare for paper shredders to be used by non-government entities. After the 1984 Supreme Court decision in California V. Greenwood , in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage left for collection outside of a home, paper shredders became more popular among US citizens with Privacy concerns. Anti-burning laws, concern over landfills, industrial espionage, and identity theft concerns created greater demand for paper shredding. Shredding at high levels continues in government agencies too. According to the report of the Paul Volcker Committee , between April and December 2004, Kofi Annan ’s then Chef de Cabinet Iqbal Riza authorized thousands of UN documents shredded including the entire chronological files of the Oil-for-Food Programme between the years 1997-1999. {Link without Title} TYPES OF SHREDDERS Shredders range in size and price from small and inexpensive units meant for a few pages, to large units used by commercial shredding services that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and can shred millions of documents an hour. Some shredders used by a commercial shredding service are built into a '''shredding truck'''. These machines are classified according to the size and shape of the shreds they produce.
There are numerous standards for the security levels of paper shredders, including:
Historically, the US General Services Administration (GSA) set paper shredder guidance in the Interim Federal Specification FF-S-001169 dated 7/1971 which was superseded by standard A-A-2599 for classified material which was canceled in 2/2000. GSA has not published a new standard since. There are also alternative shredders that use Burning , chemical Decomposition , or Composting for disposing of the shreds. ]] Shredder trucks A mobile shredding truck is a s, DVD s, Hard Drive s, Credit Card s, and uniforms, among other things. SHREDDING SERVICES Due to information privacy laws like FACTA , HIPAA and The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act Of 1999 the volume of shredding at the typical business has increased dramatically. To reduce costs many companies outsource their shredding to shredding services. These companies either shred on-site, usually with shredder trucks or off-site shredding. All shredded paper is then sent to a Paper Mill where the material is recycled and turned back into paper. UNSHREDDING In some cases, it may be possible to reassemble the pieces of shredded documents. If the shreds are not disturbed, the "noodles" or particles that belonged to the same document tend to stay close to each other. Furthermore, when the documents are fed to the shredder in a way that the lines of text are not perpendicular to the shredder blades, portions of text may remain legible on the stripes. Shredded documents can be reassembled manually. After the Iranian Revolution and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 , Iranians enlisted local carpet weavers who reconstructed the pieces by hand. The recovered documents would be later released by the Iranian regime in a series of books called "Documents from the US espionage Den". The US government subsequently improved its shredding techniques, by adding pulverizing, pulping, and chemical decomposition. Modern computer technology considerably speeds up the process of reassembling shredded documents. The strips are scanned on both sides, and then the computer determines how the strips should be put together. Robert Johnson of the National Association For Information Destruction , has stated that there is a huge demand for document reconstruction. Several companies offer commercial document reconstruction services. For maximum security, documents should be shredded so that the words of the document go through the shredder horizontally (i.e. perpendicular to the blades). Many of the documents in the Enron Accountancy Scandal were fed through the shredder the wrong way, making them easier to reassemble. |
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