After the Iranian revolution, carpet weavers reassembled shredded US documents by hand, revealing all the espionage that was going on.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder#Unshredding" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_shredder#Unshredding</a>
It's entirely possible if you're working with a reasonably small amount of material. Not even that hard to do. It's easier than a jigsaw puzzle. It's also possible to build a primitive crossbow out of pencils, rubber bands, and paper clips. (had a boring office job for a few years)
Yes.<p>It has gotten even easier to do now...<p>If you need to have something be permanently "shredded", you should consider a "high security" shredder. That is, one that not only shreds vertically, but horizontally as well. After that is finished, but the little pieces into water and turn it into mash.<p>The other option is using acid, or....<p>not writing things down that will get you put in prison.
People think of shredding as destroying a document, but in fact it's just scrambling it. And with enough time, someone will be able to unscramble it. Documents which truly need to be destroyed should probably be burned or pulped.
Good thing I put my shredded paper in my worm compost bin. (Well, actually I do that because it's beneficial to mix some lower-nitrogen waste in with the higher-nitrogen waste (vegetable scraps).<p>But it really does destroy the shreds nicely, even if it takes a few weeks.
yes, absolutely:<p><a href="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1033" rel="nofollow">http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN...</a><p>The east german stasi tried to get rid of truckloads of documents this way and lots of it got recovered.<p>The only real way that I know of getting rid of paper is to burn it or to dissolve it.<p>And with burning you still have to make sure that the ashes get crushed!<p>Paper is incredibly hard to really destroy.<p>Try burning a phone book and see how much you can still recover from it afterwards.
See also:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=east+germany+shredded+documents" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=east+germany+shredded+doc...</a>
Ecch. Years ago, working on genomics stuff, it occurred to me that the same kind of approach could unshred documents. I didn't pursue it, because I didn't think of who the market would be. (Well, that and the usual other million distractions.)
In some contexts it may be easier to find a hard drive with the electronic original text of the document that was subsequently printed, filed for a while, and then shredded.