Question about Surveillance Technology

[wwswimming]

i was thinking about this as i was taking out my office garbage today.

specifically, the use of confetti-type shredders to protect document security.

since i've seen homeless people picking through garbage at more than residence, i'd say it's not a good idea to throw away intact credit-card documents - as an example - without first shredding them.

the rule of thumb for paper-shredders is, if you get the "confetti-type", you are "secure".

but, after taking a few classes in Actionscript, in addition to being familiar with scanning technology and taking about a dozen other programming classes (etc.), i would say, even confetti-type shredding is not secure.

basically the task of re-assembling a shredded document is in the arena of private investigators and intelligence agencies. (and i'm not worried that the homeless people scouring my garbage for cans are doing anything other than that.)

still, it's an interesting technical problem, like programming a computer to assemble a jigsaw puzzle.

in the case of fragments of a color or grayscale image, you would need to re-match them according to RGB value, and coincident shapes.

in the case of fragments of a black and white image, you would need to re-match them according to lines lines up, and coincident shapes.

i imagine it's pretty challenging technically. you would need a person, or a custom document feeder, to cough up handfuls of image fragments for scanning, and a way to make sure that you're scanning both sides and that they're not "sitting on top of each other".

THEN, you would need software to take all of the resulting image files, and to spin them around in almost infinite combinations, until you get a "match" (or, several thousand matches just to re-assemble one document that's been shredded confetti-style.)

if you were trying to re-assemble a multi-page document that had been shredded confetti-style, it would result in a near-infinite variety of re-combinations.

is this technology all private domain, hidden away in government labs, or can people actually talk publicly about it ?

CONCLUSION - if you're really paranoid, buy a large galvanized garbage can and a BIC lighter.

 

[CycloWizard]

It is possible to reconstruct them, but completely infeasible if you're a regular knuckle dragger trying to pull off ID theft. However, for things like military secrets, they use uber shredders that practically break the paper down to infinitesimal pieces. Then, they collect all the pieces and burn them. Burning is the only way to be sure (aside from nuking the documents from orbit, of course).