J20 minus 56 — buy a paper shredder

I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of paper. Paper works. Its battery doesn't run out. You don't need some app that tracks you across continents to store a grocery list. It's universal.

Of course, there is also the Stringer Bell rule.

In seriousness, paper has a major downside: it's that it's very difficult to encrypt anything on paper.^[1] There's another risk. In the mid-2010s, the Electronic Frontier Foundation did research on printer microdots,^[2] eventually concluding in 2017^[3] that (emphasis theirs):

IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT ALL RECENT COMMERCIAL COLOR LASER PRINTERS PRINT SOME KIND OF FORENSIC TRACKING CODES, NOT NECESSARILY USING YELLOW DOTS. THIS IS TRUE WHETHER OR NOT THOSE CODES ARE VISIBLE TO THE EYE AND WHETHER OR NOT THE PRINTER MODELS ARE LISTED HERE. THIS ALSO INCLUDES THE PRINTERS THAT ARE LISTED HERE AS NOT PRODUCING YELLOW DOTS.

So how do we manage this risk? By investing in proper paper destruction. The most affordable way to quickly destroy paper, aside from fire, which is not always safe nor practical,^[4] is a paper shredder. But not all paper shredders are alike. Let's dive into this a little bit.

Not every paper shredder is made equal. Consumer-grade devices, the kind you might find at Target or Walmart, generally market themselves based on their features and capacity, things like hopper size, page capacity, or using terms like "cross-cut." These are nice convenience features, but they're not relevant to the essential question of how well these devices destroy data.

Enter ISO/IEC 21964 (DIN 66399) — "Office and Data technology – destruction of data carriers".^[5] This standard specifies requirements for suitable destruction of data-carrying media, ranging from optical discs (i.e. CDs), to magnetic data carriers like floppy disks or hard drives, to paper. The paper destruction levels are prefixed with a "P" and range from 1 to 7 with 7 being the most secure.

At the lowest and cheapest level, P-1, these are basic "ribbon" shredders which cut a paper into vertical strips. These are nice for destroying things like junk mail and credit card offers, but they're useless for destroying data. On the top end, P-7, are shredders suitable for the most sensitive national security information. For comparison, a P-1 shredder cuts a sheet of A-4 paper into roughly 17 or 18 particles. A P-7 shredder cuts a sheet of paper into roughly 12,750 particles, making reconstruction almost impossible, even with digital assistance. A P-7 shredder is obviously the most expensive.

Your standard, consumer-grade off-the-shelf crosscut shredder will probably be something like a P-3 or P-4 security level. These are suitable for most personal data destruction needs, things like credit card statements, receipts, or the like. A P-4 shredder isn't so expensive; a quick seach showed me I can get a small one for around $35. For most purposes, this is sufficient.^[6]

However, if you're an organizer or if you're worried about state surveillance, you might want to step it up a notch to a P-5 level device.^[7] This extra bit of security can't be stressed enough: courts have ruled that trash set out to the curb can be searched without a warrant.^[8] It's a little harder to find a P-5 shredder, but a quick search shows that they're available in roughly the $200 range.

Another option is for community spaces to invest in a higher-security and higher-quality device for communal use. If you run a workshop, collective, maker space, or similar, you might want to consider pooling together resources and investing in a P-6 or P-7 device for community use. This has an added benefit: by mixing together many documents, you make it even harder to reconstruct data that might link to someone being targeted by the authoritarian state. You can often find a good deal on these at office surplus sales, or smaller ones can be bought for as low as $5-600 if you look around.

But having a shredder alone is not enough. You also have to use it properly, which means more than just dropping paper in. Some helpful preparedness tips for paper document destruction:

• shred lots of stuff. Junk mail. Old bills. Receipts. Grocery lists. Make it a habit, that way your sensitive data is all mixed in with nonsense;
• don't leave your shred out on the curb. When possible, take it to a dump or recycling center.^[9] If it's in your house, then the cops need to get a warrant to search it;
• unfold paper before shredding it;
• when possible, avoid using unique identifiers, like different colored pages, colored pens, etc. The more plain, white paper there is, the harder it is to reconstruct.

Paper is great—it's impossible to be tracked online if you use paper. Just make sure you know how to properly destroy it, and invest in community resources for paper destruction so that your whole community can keep itself safe.