Picking Up the Pieces: Even your shredded documents aren’t safe anymore. Several companies are competing for a job to reconstruct documents that the Soviet secret police shredded in the late 80s.
“ChurchStreet, whose clients are mainly law agencies and private law firms, charges roughly $2,000 to reconstruct a cubic foot of strip-shreds. A cubic foot of shreds is generally less than 100 pages. Mr. Ford said ChurchStreet would soon offer a service to reconstruct cross-shredded documents — that is, those cut in two directions — for $8,000 to $10,000 per cubic foot.”
More at ChurchStreet-Technology.com.
Moral of the story? Burn 'em
The article talks about governments using chemical baths to return the documents to the wood pulp from whence they came.