While taking out the trash this evening, it occured to me anything I put to the curb is fair game, anyone has access to my garbage. So how does the White House handle its trash to keep nosy busybodies from going through it looking for who knows what? Shredders can only do so much. Does the Secret Service go with the truck to the landfill?
The garbage is delivered to Fox News which gave us the saying . . .
Garbage in . . . Garbage out.
I have found this picture which shows the Dalai Lama leaving through an exit of the White House usually used by the staff. Garbage bags are shown piled up outside, no idea where they go from here but they don’t look ‘special’ in any way.
What comes out of a certified-for-Top Secret shredder looks like course baking flour. Nothing is gonna reassemble that. The shredders you’ve seen at the big box office store are toys.
Every government agency & many corporations take signficant pains to keep office paper & other information-bearing stuff 100% separate from used sandwich wrappers and half-eaten sandwiches.
At the places that are uber conscious, it’s not unheard of to pay people to paw through all the garbage one piece at a time to double-check for any secure stuff that got accidentlayy mixed in. Does the White House do that? Beats me; you’ll have to ask them yourself.
Whaaaaaat? In all my travels, I’ve never encountered a TS shredder that did that. The strips that come out have to be 3/32" by 1/2":
LSLGuy covered it. Top Secret shredders are freaking awesome. You can even put CDs/DVDs in them, and what comes out is pretty much powder. Fun to play with!
Chessic, maybe that’s the bare minimum, but the first one I saw had me playing with it all day. Maybe powder/flour is slight hyperbole, but it was definitely smaller than what you described.
“May not exceed” and “have to be” are opposites. The shreds will predominantly be smaller than the maximum. Even a good home shredder produces something much like confetti. I agree flour may be an exaggeration.
In addition to everything that can be being shredded to the extreme, in the DC area there are multiple contractors with security clearances that do things like pick up waste from places like the pentagon and see it to incineration. I imagine nothing coming out of the white house is ever touched by anyone that doesn’t have a level of security clearance sufficient to do so and is legally bound to see it to destruction.
Not exactly on topic, but years ago I read that the Pentagon uses a pulping machine instead of a shredder/incinerator system. What came out was wet paper pulp-which was trucked off and disposed of.
If I remember the appropriate section of (I think) NISPOM [National Industrial Security Procedures & Operating Manual] correctly, approved methods include incineration, shredding, pulping, and acid bathing.
The shredder I used to use (a dinosaur of a machine) cut everything down to granules. About 1 mm X 1 mm, I would guess. It was unable to eat the telephone that it was fed.
When I was in the Navy, classified documents, even after they were shredded, were either burned or disposed of via the submarine’s trash disposal unit in very deep water. (There was some minimum water depth prescribed.)
Where I work secure waste is first shredded, then taken to a different location (why baffles me ) under escort and then burned while witnessed.
I would imagine that Whitehouse other garbage is checked through in case someone tries to use it to get things out of the installation.
Not necessarily confidential information but things to be sold on as collectors items, or sheer down to earth theft.
The NISPOM is freely available for download from the Defense Security Service website in PDF format - there’s a link on this page. (While it describes procedures for handling classified information, that document is itself unclassified.)