I thought it might be interesting to use our combined resources to have a session ‘purge ’ of potential identity theft information.

I’ve heard of people buying hard-drives and old machines on Ebay and finding all sorts of stuff on the drives.

I made a few calls to see if one of the local shredders would like to come and be part of a “destructothon” at MindCamp where we clean harddrives, shred papers, clean tapes/floppies etc and generally raise awareness on identity theft through these routes.

I made a few calls and found that, much to my surprise, there is a local company, Shred-It, that already participates in numerous “community shreds” sponsored by local cities and governments. Not Seattle, but nearly every city around Seattle. The weekend of Mindcamp they will be doing one in Renton, at the Walmart.

In cleaning harddrives, perhaps we might have a PC with Darik’s Boot and Nuke configured, a handful of torx-8(?) screwdrivers to show how easy it is to open a harddrive (and recover the cool magnets). Maybe do something interesting with the platters.

If someone has a real industrial strength demagnetizer for vhs/dat/8mm/beta tapes that would be helpful.

Is there any interest in someone running with this who actually knows something about it?  Before I knew about the concept of the free ‘community shreds’ I thought it would be interesting, thinking that the paper shredding would be the ‘center of interest’, w/o that i’m not not sure it’s still a viable activity—- but I thought I’d toss it out there.