Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Document Security

So over the last day or two I have been trying to consolidate piles of documents that have traveled from three apartments to this house. Naturally, I have been throwing away a lot of personal documents. So I have been thinking a little bit about identity theft.

I am, of course, the proud owner of a document shredder. Pretty much anything with a complete name and address or more goes in the shredder rather than just being pitched.

It did occur to me that a particularly dedicated indentity thief would not mind taking the time to paste together documents even if they were shredded. I mean, this would be a waste of time in my neighborhood, but I can think of a few places where it might turn out to be worth the effort.

Now I know that the people that make shredders make "confetti" shredders for this purpose. But really, that just guarantees more pieces, and if our intrepid felon is in for a penny he'll probably just buy that much more tape.

What we're looking for here is a genuine disincentive.

We need something that won't just make the job more tedious, but rather something that would inspire the thought in the person that really they were in the wrong line of work.

This is what lead me to think of my newest invention:

I'm thinking of calling it the "Watchcat Document Security System." The cats really do love playing with the shredded paper, and I can't think of anything that would make a crook think twice more than this. Its a match made in heaven.

Anyone want to put up some capital and be my business partner?

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