[ARRL-OK] This will scare you!!! I never knew this...Copying Machine... important information

[Kim Elmore]

At some level, Nate is right: the vast majority of the stuff on 
copiers is of no value. Identity theft is an easy thing to pull: all 
that anyone has to do is go to the court house and pull up any of a 
number of filing: social security numbers are all over those. Court 
documents are public -- anyone can go get copies unless the records 
have been specifically made otherwise. Many such copies are available on line.

Crooks are crooks: they're fundamentally lazy, not exceptionally 
bright or well educated, and after easy money. The vast majority are 
not particularly tech savvy. There is a tremendous amount of havoc 
that could be wrought by tech savvy crooks, and we simply don't see 
it happening.

Thus, I disagree that this is particularly scary. When they were 
living, my parents listened to police communications a lot. In doing 
this, they came to have a rather skewed view of the world: they 
became convinced that all the bad things they heard on the scanner 
was the norm and, as they became older and more infirm, they became 
more frightened by this skew. Don't fall into the same trap:don't 
confuse what is possible with what is plausible.

It's probably a good and reasonable thing for the copy machine 
companies to either randomly encrypt each image, or delete them after 
printing is complete. Deletion is, however, no guarantee that the 
image is not recoverable. That said, it may be more important for the 
lease/resale companies to see to the deletion task. And it is very 
important for companies that bear responsibility for their own and 
their client's security to do this. If a security breach could be 
traced back to lax practices by the company, it would suffer extreme 
liability exposure.

I disagree about the veracity of CBS, however: I trust their 
reporting far more than various other sources. CBS has done a service 
by informing us of how things work. It's up to us what to do with the 
information.

Kim Elmore. N5OP