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A paper shredder is a mechanical device used to cut sheets of
paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, Textile, rags, poaceae, grasses, Feces#Other uses, herbivore dung, or other vegetable sources in water. Once the water is dra ...
into either strips or fine particles. Government organizations, businesses, and private individuals use shredders to destroy private, confidential, or otherwise sensitive documents.


History


Invention

The first paper shredder is credited to
inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea, or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...
Abbot Augustus Low Abbot Augustus Low (Gus Low) (1844–1912) was an entrepreneur and inventor from Brooklyn, who lived in St. Lawrence County, New York and was the owner of the Horseshoe Forestry Company.Yuan, JuliBog river: a paradise for manyFebruary 1, 2005 N ...
, whose
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
was filed on February 2, 1909. His invention was never manufactured because he died prematurely soon after filing the patent. Adolf Ehinger's paper shredder, based on a hand-crank pasta maker, was the first to be manufactured in 1935 in Germany. Supposedly he created a shredding machine to shred his anti-Nazi leaflets to avoid the inquiries of the authorities. Ehinger later marketed and began selling his patented shredders to government agencies and financial institutions switching from hand-crank shredders to electric motor shredders. Ehinger's company, EBA Maschinenfabrik, manufactured the first cross-cut paper shredders in 1959 and continues to do so today as EBA Krug & Priester GmbH & Co. in Balingen. Before the
fall of the Berlin Wall The fall of the Berlin Wall (, ) on 9 November in German history, 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, marked the beginning of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain, as East Berlin transit restrictions we ...
, a “wet shredder” was invented in the former
German Democratic Republic East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from Foundation of East Germany, its formation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on ...
. To prevent paper shredders in the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) from glutting, this device mashed paper snippets with
water Water is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula . It is a transparent, tasteless, odorless, and Color of water, nearly colorless chemical substance. It is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known liv ...
. With a shift from paper to digital document production, modern industrial shredders have been designed to process non-paper media, such as credit cards and CDs.


Applications

Until the mid-1980s, it was rare for paper shredders to be used by non-government entities. A prominent example of their use was when the U.S. embassy in Iran used shredders to reduce
paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, Textile, rags, poaceae, grasses, Feces#Other uses, herbivore dung, or other vegetable sources in water. Once the water is dra ...
pages to strips before the embassy was taken over in 1979. Some documents were reconstructed from the strips, as detailed below. After Colonel
Oliver North Oliver Laurence North (born October 7, 1943) is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. A veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a National Sec ...
told
Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...
that he used a Schleicher cross-cut model to shred Iran-Contra documents, sales increased nearly 20 percent in 1987. Paper shredders became more popular among U.S. citizens with
privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...
concerns after the 1988
Supreme Court In most legal jurisdictions, a supreme court, also known as a court of last resort, apex court, high (or final) court of appeal, and court of final appeal, is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
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. Anti-burning laws also resulted in increased demand for paper shredding. More recently, concerns about
identity theft Identity theft, identity piracy or identity infringement occurs when someone uses another's personal identifying information, like their name, identifying number, or credit card number, without their permission, to commit fraud or other crimes. ...
have driven increased personal use of paper shredders, with the US Federal Trade Commission recommending that individuals shred financial documents before disposal.
Information privacy Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as dat ...
laws such as FACTA,
HIPAA The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA or the Kennedy– Kassebaum Act) is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, ...
, and the
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, () is an act of the 106th United States Congress (1999–2001). It repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in ...
drive shredder usage, as businesses and individuals take steps to securely dispose of confidential information.


Types

Shredders range in size and price. Small, inexpensive units are designed for a certain number of pages. Large, expensive units are used by commercial shredding services and can shred millions of documents per hour. While the smallest shredders may be hand-cranked, most shredders are electric. Over time, new features were added to improve user experience, including rejecting paper over capacity to avoid jams, and other safety features to reduce risk. Some shredders designed for use in shared workspaces or department copy rooms have noise reduction.


Mobile shredding truck

Large organizations or shredding services sometimes use "mobile shredding trucks", typically constructed as a box truck with an industrial-size paper shredder mounted inside with storage space for shredded materials. Such units may also provide the shredding of CDs, DVDs,
hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
s, credit cards, and
uniform A uniform is a variety of costume worn by members of an organization while usually participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are most often worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency serv ...
s, among other things.


Kiosks

A 'shredding kiosk' is an automated retail machine (or
kiosk Historically, a kiosk () was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Iran, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist ...
) that allows public access to a commercial or industrial-capacity paper shredder. This is an alternative solution to the use of a personal or business paper shredder, where the public can use a faster and more powerful shredder, paying for each shredding event rather than purchasing shredding equipment.


Services

Some companies
outsource Outsourcing is a business practice in which company, companies use external providers to carry out business processes that would otherwise be handled internally. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to ...
their shredding to 'shredding services'. These companies either shred on-site, with mobile shredder trucks or have off-site shredding facilities. Documents slated for shredding are often placed in locked bins that are emptied periodically.


Shredding method, and output

As well as size and capacity, shredders are classified according to the method they use and the size and shape of the shreds they produce. *''Strip-cut'' shredders use rotating knives to cut narrow strips as long as the original sheet of paper. *''Cross-cut'' or '' confetti-cut'' shredders use two contra-rotating drums to cut rectangular, parallelogram, or lozenge (diamond-shaped) shreds. *''Particle-cut'' or ''Micro-cut'' shredders create tiny square or circular pieces. *''Cardboard'' shredders are designed specifically to shred corrugated material into either strips or a mesh pallet. *''Disintegrators'' and ''granulators'' repeatedly cut the paper at random with rotating knives in a drum until the particles are small enough to pass through a fine mesh. *'' Hammermills'' pound the paper through a screen. *''Pierce-and-tear'' shredders have rotating blades that pierce the paper and then tear it apart. *''Grinders'' have a rotating shaft with cutting blades that grind the paper until it is small enough to fall through a screen.


Security levels

There is a number of standards covering the security levels of paper shredders, including:


''Deutsches Institut für Normung'' (DIN)

The previous DIN 32757 standard has now been replaced with DIN 66399. This is complex, but can be summarized as below: *Level P-1 = ≤ 2000 mm2 particles or ≤ 12 mm wide strips of any length (For shredding general internal documents such as instructions, forms, expired notices) *Level P-2 = ≤ 800 mm2 particles or ≤ 6 mm wide strips of any length *Level P-3 = ≤ 320 mm2 particles or ≤ 2 mm wide strips of any length (For highly sensitive documents and personal data subject to high protection requirements, purchase order, order confirmations or delivery notes with address data) *Level P-4 = ≤ 160 mm2 particles with width ≤ 6 mm (Particularly sensitive and confidential data, working documents, customer/client data, invoices, private tax and financial documents) *Level P-5 = ≤ 30 mm2 particles with width ≤ 2 mm (Data that must be kept secret, balance sheets and profit-and-loss, strategy papers, design and engineering documents, personal data) *Level P-6 = ≤ 10 mm2 particles with width ≤ 1 mm (Secret high-security data, patents, research and development documents) *Level P-7 = ≤ 5 mm2 particles with width ≤ 1 mm (Top secret, highly classified data for the military, embassies, intelligence services)


NSA/CSS

The
United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...
and Central Security Service produce "NSA/CSS Specification 02-01 for High Security Crosscut Paper Shredders". They provide a list of evaluated shredders.


ISO/IEC

The
International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. M ...
and the
International Electrotechnical Commission The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; ) is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronics, electronic and related technologies. IEC standards cover a va ...
produce "ISO/IEC 21964 Information technology — Destruction of data carriers". The
General Data Protection Regulation The General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), abbreviated GDPR, is a European Union regulation on information privacy in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of ...
(GDPR), which came into force in May 2018, regulates the handling and processing of personal data. ISO/IEC 21964 and DIN 66399 support data protection in business processes.


Destruction of evidence

There have been many instances where it is alleged that documents have been improperly or illegally destroyed by shredding, including: *
Oliver North Oliver Laurence North (born October 7, 1943) is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. A veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a National Sec ...
shredded documents relating to the
Iran–Contra affair The Iran–Contra affair (; ), also referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, the Iran Initiative, or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that centered on arms trafficking to Iran between 1981 and 1986, facilitat ...
between November 21 and November 25, 1986. During the trial, North testified that on November 21, 22, or 24, he witnessed John Poindexter destroy what may have been the only signed copy of a presidential covert action finding that sought to authorize CIA participation in the November 1985 Hawk missile shipment to Iran. *According to the report of the
Paul Volcker Committee The Paul Volcker Committee (Independent Inquiry Committee) was formed to investigate alleged corruption and fraud in the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq. The committee was appointed by Secretary-General of the United Nations, UN Secr ...
, between April and December 2004,
Kofi Annan Kofi Atta Annan (8 April 193818 August 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder a ...
's ''Chef de Cabinet'', Iqbal Riza, authorized thousands of United Nations documents shredded, including the entire chronological files of the Oil-for-Food Programme during the years 1997 through 1999. *The Union Bank of Switzerland used paper shredders to destroy evidence that their company owned property stolen from
Jews Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
during the
Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
by the
Nazi Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
government. The shredding was disclosed to the public through the work of Christoph Meili, a security guard working at the bank who happened to wander by a room where the shredding was taking place. Also in the shredding room were books from the German Reichsbank. They listed stock accounts for companies involved in the holocaust, including
BASF BASF SE (), an initialism of its original name , is a European Multinational corporation, multinational company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters are located in Ludwigshafen, Ge ...
, Degussa, and Degesch. They also listed real-estate records for Berlin properties that had been forcibly taken by the Nazis, placed in Swiss accounts, and then claimed to be owned by UBS. Destruction of such documents was a violation of Swiss laws.Swiss parliament:
Parliamentary Initiative 96.434: Bundesbeschluss betreffend die historische und rechtliche Untersuchung des Schicksals der infolge der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft in die Schweiz gelangten Vermögenswerte
''; in German. Entry in force December 14, 1996. This edict was the legal foundation of the Bergier commission, constituted on December 19, 1996. Articles 4, 5, and 7 made the willful destruction or withholding of documents relating to orphaned assets illegal. On the dates given, see
Chronology: Switzerland in World War II — Detailed Overview of the years 1994-1996
''. URLs last accessed 2006-10-30.


Unshredding and forensics

For paper shredders to achieve their purpose, it should not be possible to reassemble and read shredded documents. In practice, this depends on how well the shredding has been done, and the resources put into reconstruction. The amount of effort put into reconstruction often depends on the importance of the document, e.g. whether it is a simple personal matter,
corporate espionage Industrial espionage, also known as economic espionage, corporate spying, or corporate espionage, is a form of espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of purely national security. While political espionage is conducted or orchestrat ...
, a criminal matter, or a matter of
national security National security, or national defence (national defense in American English), is the security and Defence (military), defence of a sovereign state, including its Citizenship, citizens, economy, and institutions, which is regarded as a duty of ...
. The difficulty of reconstruction can depend on the size and legibility of the text, whether the document is single- or double-sided, the size and shape of the shredded pieces, the orientation of the material when fed, how effectively the shredded material is further randomized afterwards, and whether other processes such as pulping and chemical decomposition are used. Even without a full reconstruction, in some cases useful information can be obtained by forensic analysis of the paper, ink, and cutting method.


Reconstruction examples

*After the
Iranian Revolution The Iranian Revolution (, ), also known as the 1979 Revolution, or the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (, ) was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. The revolution led to the replacement of the Impe ...
and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in
Tehran Tehran (; , ''Tehrân'') is the capital and largest city of Iran. It is the capital of Tehran province, and the administrative center for Tehran County and its Central District (Tehran County), Central District. With a population of around 9. ...
in 1979, Iranians enlisted local carpet weavers who reconstructed the pieces by hand. The recovered documents would be later released by the Iranian government 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 protocols. *Modern computer technology considerably speeds up the process of reassembling shredded documents. The strips are scanned on both sides, and then a 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 Accounting scandals were fed through the shredder the wrong way, making them easier to reassemble. *In 2003, there was an effort underway to recover the shredded archives of the
Stasi The Ministry for State Security (, ; abbreviated MfS), commonly known as the (, an abbreviation of ), was the Intelligence agency, state security service and secret police of East Germany from 1950 to 1990. It was one of the most repressive pol ...
, the East German secret police. There are "millions of shreds of paper that panicked Stasi officials threw into garbage bags during the regime's final days in the fall of 1989". As it took three dozen people six years to reconstruct 300 of the 16,000 bags, the Fraunhofer-IPK institute has developed the ''Stasi-Schnipselmaschine'' ('Stasi snippet machine') for computerized reconstruction and is testing it in a pilot project. *The DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011 called upon computer scientists, puzzle enthusiasts, and anyone else with an interest in solving complex problems, to compete for up to $50,000 by piecing together a series of shredded documents. The Shredder Challenge consisted of five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the document subject matter and the method of shredding were varied to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants were required to provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document. The overall prizewinner and prize awarded was dependent on the number and difficulty of the problems solved.
DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...
declared a winner on December 2, 2011 (the winning entry was submitted 33 days after the challenge began) – the winner was " All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S." using a combination system that used automated sorting to pick the best fragment combinations to be reviewed by humans.


Forensic identification

The individual shredder that was used to destroy a given document may sometimes be of
forensic Forensic science combines principles of law and science to investigate criminal activity. Through crime scene investigations and laboratory analysis, forensic scientists are able to link suspects to evidence. An example is determining the time and ...
interest. Shredders display certain device-specific characteristics, "
fingerprint A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfa ...
s", like the exact spacing of the blades, the degree and pattern of their wear. By closely examining the shredded material, the minute variations of size of the paper strips and the microscopic marks on their edges may be able to be linked to a specific machine. (cf. the forensic identification of typewriters.)


Recycling of waste

The resulting shredded paper can be recycled in a number of ways, including: *''Animal bedding'' — To produce a warm and comfortable bed for animals *''Void fill and packaging'' — Void fill for the transportation of goods *'' Briquettes'' — an alternative to non-renewable fuels *''Insulation'' — Shredded newsprint mixed with flame-retardant chemicals and glue to create a sprayable insulation material for wall interiors and the underside of roofing


See also

* Baler * Industrial shredder * Paper recycling * Used note


References

{{Paper American inventions Office equipment Paper recycling Records management technology Security Products introduced in 1935