Use a shredder? Now those documents can be put back together

Using an ordinary office-grade scanner and some simple character recognition, at least one company promises to recreate shredded documents. That’s just one of the things I learned in this Slate article about “unshredding”:

Before advances in scanning and computer technology, documents had to be reconstructed by hand. Assuming all the pieces are in one place, reassembling a shredded document is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle; the reconstructionist must painstakingly sift through the shreds, looking for matches. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, students and militants who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran turned to local carpet weavers to reassemble classified CIA documents they found that had been shredded. These pages were later published in a set of about 60 volumes called Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den. And in 2002, former FBI agent William Daly took about an hour to reassemble a shredded page from the dictionary on Good Morning America.

Other takeaways? Some “shredders” go way further than that — they pulverize the paper into dust, says Slate. I should tell my sister. She’s been a ferocious user of paper shredders since she was about a pre-teen. Anything — even junk mail — that has her name or address on it goes into the shredder. Once, we got her a crosscut shredder for Christmas, which cuts the paper into small squares, rather than long strips and is much harder to reassemble. She was delighted.