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Macy's parade: 'Shredded police papers in confetti'
- jevinskie 14y agoCross cut shredders people! NSA specifies: “Maximum Particle Dimensions: 75% of the shredded particles shall have no edge dimension exceeding 5 millimeters in length. The remaining particles may exhibit edge dimensions between 5 and 12.5 millimeters in length.” Better yet, shred then take it to a recycling center where it is pulped immediately. Or shred it then burn it if you are cold/don't care about carbon emissions!
- dpearson 14y agoIt doesn't matter how it's shredded; you still shouldn't be throwing paper that had someone's social security number on it (especially when that someone is a detective whose whole identity has now been revealed) off of a roof on national television.
- kmfrk 14y agoThey would probably be crucified, if they were subject to something like HIPAA.
- gry 14y agoI am not a lawyer. In my experience, HIPPA does not provide any spec. It is akin to "did/do you have reasonable precautions for X?" so every organization is different, though many go to the extreme under HIPPA, because it providing documentation you had documentation, or documented you provided the document ad nauseam. It has little do do with how to mangle a document. That said, HIPPA does have something: it persuades cynicism and paranoia. Two words which make cautious.
- danielweber 14y agoI don't know if the technology has improved since last I checked, but recycling shredded paper is a no-no. The fibers in the shredded paper are too short to make usable paper products from.
- Tichy 14y agoMust have seemed like a brilliant plan: where better to hide the papers than in a confetti parade?
- nisse72 14y agoLearned something today: Macy's has an "official confetti".
- skyebook 14y agoWhat's most perplexing to me is how/why shreddings from a police department in a suburban police department came to be used, considering the relative size of the NYPD. Unless the floats and everything relating to the parade were prepared on the island.
- btipling 14y agoI suspect the police department used a document disposal company, and this company took advantage of an opportunity to supply some organization at the parade with paper and simply ignored the security requirements of their customers. Given that the actual shredding job wasn't very good in the first place, the Nassa County Police should probably start looking for a new document disposal provider.
- damian2000 14y agoOr maybe just found a way to dispose of it for free - doubt anyone would be paying for shredded paper to use as confetti.
- revelation 14y agoSurely police departments aren't allowed to hand such sensitive data to just any external processing company?
- philwelch 14y agoI don't know about police departments, but every big company I've ever worked at outsourced their shredding. Any sensitive documents went in the shred bin, which was periodically picked up by the shredding company. It makes no sense to me either.
- jrockway 14y agoI think the security level is different. I wouldn't use a shredding service to dispose of old checks or my social security card, but for things that don't matter to the real world like performance reviews or meeting notes, I think it's fine. Everywhere I've worked, the bin has always been "secured" with a three-pin lock that can be picked with a paperclip. That's a good way of expressing how seriously document destruction is taken.
- Devilboy 14y agoIf you have really serious security concerns, there are companies that will shred your documents on-site and then take them away to be burned.
- Evbn 14y agoI am surprised that there isn't some form of corn-starch-based confetti that would dissolve in the rain, used in these parades. It would be cheaper than paper due to corn subsidies.
- DrJ 14y agothis might be a viable food source for the local rodent population.
- eli 14y agoI dunno, shredded waste paper is pretty darn cheap.
- randomdata 14y agoCorn is in short supply and is currently being sold at record high prices. Subsidies have lead to cheap corn in the past, but corn hasn't been cheap for several years now.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThis is amazing. That anyone in law enforcement could imagine not having an audited document disposal process is hard to believe.
- dagw 14y agoI imagine they probably do have an official and audited document disposal process which complies with all relevant recommendations, but someone along the line simply ignored it.
- adriand 14y agoCould people who picked up pieces of confetti and stuck them together in order to decipher their contents be charged with a crime, similarly to how people have been prosecuted for "hacking" by retrieving information through trivial tinkering with public URLs?
- geekam 14y ago>> similarly to how people have been prosecuted for "hacking" by retrieving information through trivial tinkering with public URLs I had no clue that happened. Scary.
- damian2000 14y agoGood example of it here: http://risky.biz/minter http://risky.biz/minter (direct object reference in URL)
- mitchty 14y agoIt goes back to really old case law as to "allowed" access to a computer system. Basically if you see a url with /foo.html?user=1234 and you go, hmm lets switch the number to 1235 and see what happens. Basically that is outside of reasonable expectations to access a system. Or something like that, i'm not a lawyer but that is how I understand the case law works for now.
- jrockway 14y agoIt depends on the well-accepted legal test of whether or not they were wearing Guy Fawkes masks at the time.
- jackowayed 14y agoIf they were to actually exploit their possession of the information (eg. get credit in the person's name by piecing together confetti with name, DOB, and SSN), it would be a crime. The tricky thing is that with hacking, the line between piecing together the vulnerability and exploiting it doesn't involve as much clearcut intent and harm.
- rhplus 14y agoIn large organizations that out-source their recycling/shredding there are typically two bins: a wide mouth "Paper Recycling" bin and a small mouthed "Secure Shredding" bin. I wouldn't be surprised if an office worker saw the two bins and decided against feeding a huge stack of documents 20-at-a-time into the secure bin instead dumped the whole stack into the non-secure bin.
- zalew 14y agoI remember in Brasil companies throwing out their shredded docs from the office building, as confetti.