
Is it possible to reassemble a shredded document? - terpua
http://www.slate.com/id/2223844/
======
kingkawn
After the Iranian revolution, carpet weavers reassembled shredded US documents
by hand, revealing all the espionage that was going on.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder#Unshredding>

~~~
jeroen
The Stasi documents are probably the biggest project in this category:

"The Stasi files are something else entirely. In 2000, the BStU collected them
and sent them to Magdeburg, a decaying East German industrial city 90 miles
west of Berlin. In hand-numbered brown paper sacks, neatly stacked on row
after row of steel shelves, they fill a three-story, 60,000-square-foot
warehouse on the northern edge of town. Each sack contains about 40,000
fragments, for a total of 600 million pieces of paper (give or take a hundred
million). And each fragment has two sides. That's more than a billion images."

[http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_sta...](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi?currentPage=all)

~~~
eru
Though it has dark side: I heard rumours that the reconstructions is
deliberately slowed down by low-tech. The Stasi (east German secret police)
amassed documents that could embarrass powerful people.

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jsz0
It's entirely possible if you're working with a reasonably small amount of
material. Not even that hard to do. It's easier than a jigsaw puzzle. It's
also possible to build a primitive crossbow out of pencils, rubber bands, and
paper clips. (had a boring office job for a few years)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'd have thought that the security services, NRO for example, have software
that receives scans of paper strips and does edge matching to reconstruct the
page.

It doesn't seem too hard algorithmically (to this non-programmer) to do that,
something like: take all strips and analyse them for position of edge
markings; take all edges and compare the edge-marking positions giving a
matching score by pair, match up the best scores and display to a user for
final arrangement.

If you were looking at fragments of paper I'd probably go with a letter
matching based on pre-analysis of the font used (by machine). use the letter
matching to arrange the fragments as if they were strips and proceed from
there.

I'd be amazed if such things don't exist.

We shred and compost if more security is needed.

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blhack
Yes.

It has gotten even easier to do now...

If you need to have something be permanently "shredded", you should consider a
"high security" shredder. That is, one that not only shreds vertically, but
horizontally as well. After that is finished, but the little pieces into water
and turn it into mash.

The other option is using acid, or....

not writing things down that will get you put in prison.

~~~
randallsquared
_not writing things down that will get you put in prison._

Well, that's just unreasonable. Everyone has to write things down that would
get them thrown in prison, right?

Right?

:(

~~~
tc
«Que l'on me donne six lignes écrite de la main de l'homme le plus honnête, et
je trouverai de quoi le faire pendre !»

("Give me six lines from the hand of the most honest man, and I will find in
them a reason to hang him!")

\-- Cardinal de Richelieu, Mirame

~~~
tyrcikytgv
Well writing your secrets in French will probably keep them safe in America,
but not in other countries.

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karzeem
People think of shredding as destroying a document, but in fact it's just
scrambling it. And with enough time, someone will be able to unscramble it.
Documents which truly need to be destroyed should probably be burned or
pulped.

------
mmagin
Good thing I put my shredded paper in my worm compost bin. (Well, actually I
do that because it's beneficial to mix some lower-nitrogen waste in with the
higher-nitrogen waste (vegetable scraps).

But it really does destroy the shreds nicely, even if it takes a few weeks.

------
est
Well in China everyone use a 0.25 dollar ligher instead of a shredder to
destroy documents.

~~~
tyrcikytgv
Trying burning modern laser printer/copier paper, it's not easy, especially
lots of pages together

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jacquesm
yes, absolutely:

[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-
News.asp?NewsN...](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-
News.asp?NewsNum=1033)

The east german stasi tried to get rid of truckloads of documents this way and
lots of it got recovered.

The only real way that I know of getting rid of paper is to burn it or to
dissolve it.

And with burning you still have to make sure that the ashes get crushed!

Paper is incredibly hard to really destroy.

Try burning a phone book and see how much you can still recover from it
afterwards.

~~~
eru
In waste-energy plants they use special equipment to burn phone books.

------
jknupp
Summary: yes, unless it is _too_ shredded.

Also, water is wet.

~~~
pbhj
Water is not always wet.

------
parenthesis
See also:

[http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=east+germany+shredded+doc...](http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=east+germany+shredded+documents)

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bkovitz
Ecch. Years ago, working on genomics stuff, it occurred to me that the same
kind of approach could unshred documents. I didn't pursue it, because I didn't
think of who the market would be. (Well, that and the usual other million
distractions.)

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tokenadult
In some contexts it may be easier to find a hard drive with the electronic
original text of the document that was subsequently printed, filed for a
while, and then shredded.

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lallysingh
A quick lesson: if you're doing something where unshredding will get you in
prison or shot, pay the extra $$ for a cross-cut shredder.

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jemmons
Yes.

