by Paul Rubin
My old paper shredder is a Fellowes
Shred-Mate, a nice little cross-cut unit about the size
of a two-slice toaster. Although it can shred only 2-3 sheets of
paper at a time (folded lengthwise), it's solidly built and cuts
shreds of 4*30mm, a fairly normal shred size for an office cross-cut
shredder, and it cost only $20 on Ebay.
The Shred-mate is great for shredding the occasional phone bill or
credit card receipt before tossing it into the trash. But with enough
persistence, I found I could reassemble the output more easily than
I'd like. My usual test of a paper shredder is to shred a $1 bill and
then see if I can reconstruct the serial number from the shreds.
(I've shredded about $3 that way in the past couple years, so I'm not
exactly going broke). And current preferred security practice is to
shred all your wastepaper, not just the sensitive stuff, making
the tiny Shredmate tedious to use. Besides shredding slowly, you have
to empty the basket every dozen or so sheets of paper. And the
Shredmate just isn't built to handle substantial shredding volume. So
I decided I wanted something more serious, that could shred faster and
smaller.
After a fair amount of angst and comparison shopping, I just got a
Royal CIA 12X. This is the top of Royal's cutesy-named series of
shredders ("These products are not approved, endorsed or authorized by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence
Agency") which includes the FBI models (which make larger cross-cut
particles than the CIA 12x) and the FBI/CIA "Double Agent" (which can
make both strip and cross cuts). The CIA 12x cost $199.99 at Office
Max, plus I got two years of GE extension warranty at $19.99 a year
(you can get up to five years). If you need GE warranty service, they
send someone to fix or replace the item on site. This is attractive
because the CIA 12X weighs over 50 pounds, which makes it expensive
and cumbersome to ship anywhere.
The CIA 12X can shred up to 12 pages at a time into 3*10mm shreds.
This is the smallest particle size I know from a consumer-grade
shredder.
The particle size is 30 mm2, which
meets the requirements for
DIN 32757 Security Level 4
(Google
English translation).
The next step up in security seems to be DoD-grade shredders
approved for shredding classified material. These start around $1K
and cut the paper to 0.8*11mm particles or smaller. I actually
entertained the idea of buying one for a while, until financial common
sense won out. Spending $200 to shred old ATM slips and credit card
bills at home is silly enough already, but excusable since I'm a
security nerd so I have a professional interest in equipment like
this. Spending $1000+ in my situation just seemed like going too far.
(The models I really liked were $1500 and up). I tried cutting some
CIA 12x shreds down to classified size with scissors, and it didn't
help that much--e.g., I could still identify parts of a Pacbell
phone bill from the distinctive color stripes on the shreds. This was
a lot harder to do in general though than with the Shredmate shreds,
so the CIA 12x is a big improvement over a typical cross-cut office
shredder. Ultra-high security installations presumably use $15K+ knife mill
disintegrators which use 460 volt power to chop the paper into
powder instead of shreds, and can reduce cardboard and plastic as well
as paper. But I digress.
The other shredder I looked at seriously was the
Fellowes Powershred PS80, the highest model "personal shredder" in
Fellowes line and the highest model on their web site. Fellowes makes
some much more serious office-grade shredders that you can buy through
catalogs and on the internet (for example here) but for
some reason they don't list those on their site. The PS80 at Staples
is about the same price as the CIA-12X at Office Max so I examined
both. The PS80 stuff below is from trying out the unit at the store
and reading its manual, but I may have missed or forgotten some
things:
I later discovered the PS80 has gotten some
not-so-favorable
reviews on Epinions, so I'm glad I didn't get one.
The CIA 12x is quite enjoyable to use and I shredded about 5 pounds of
paper in my first evening with it. Yes,
shredding
is fun!
Besides a pile of old junk mail
and papers I had waiting to shred, I ran a cardboard priority mail
envelope through the shredder, a thin piece of corrugated cardboard,
an expired credit card, and 2 squares of toilet paper to see how the
shredder would deal with soft material. (Shredding junk mail is
important, especially preapproved credit card offers which are common
targets for identity thieves). Everything went through fine--the
toilet paper didn't immediately appear in the output basket but its
shreds came out mixed with those of the next few sheets shredded. The
credit card made a slightly scary sound (like tinfoil being cut) when
its foil hologram hit the cutting head. I don't think shredding
credit cards can be very good for the shredder. But since I only have
one or two of them expire per year, I'm probably not doing real
damage shredding that few of them. (For $565 you can get a specialty
shredder made for cutting tough materials like credit cards and
CD-roms). The next generation of credit cards will probably contain
smart card chips and I'll be more concerned about damaging
the 12x with those cards than I am about conventional cards.
The 12x's main disadvantages are issues with cutting hard materials
(like staples), and the thermal cutout, which I set off several times.
Unlike Royal's earlier Orca
9512x, the 12x is made to look attractive (like a kitchen
wastebasket) and probably sacrifices some airflow around the cutting
head to get its smooth contours. I think its duty cycle could be
improved significantly by adding some air vents and possibly a cooling
fan. Adding the fan and toughening the cutting wheels might add some
cost, but there's currently a large gap between the $200 CIA-12x and
professional high security shredders of comparable speed, which start
at $1500 or so (the $1000 units are much slower). So a "CIA 12z" (a
12x with the improvements just mentioned) at $300 would fill a need, and
I'd have probably bought one if it existed.
The 12x's output particles were large enough that they often stuck
together from getting crunched thorough a stack of paper. This might
cause a small theoretical security loss, since the opponent could tell
that a bunch of shreds came from the same part of the page, and from
the same document. DoD-approved shredders aren't allowed to clump
shreds like that, and their smaller particles probably prevent the
clumping. I'm not worried. Stirring up the shreds in the basket with
a kitty litter scoop every now and then should mix them up enough to
remove any hope of computer-assisted
reconstruction (see also this article
about restoring smashed frescoes using image analysis methods). I may
also put my 12x in my kitchen where it would double as a general
purpose wastebasket and save me some floor space. Any attacker
willing to separate the mixture of paper shreds from disgusting wet
kitchen trash before attempting to analyze the shreds has my
admiration and pity.
Occasionally, a piece of paper doesn't go through straight, and
jams up against one edge of the entry slot. The result is you get
some long thin strips in the basket instead of small particles. This
isn't a big deal either. I haven't seen any cross-cut shredders that
don't do that, though I haven't seen a classified-approved shredder in
action yet. If you see a misfeed, you can remove the strips from the
basket and run them through the shredder again, wrapped in another
piece of paper. That will chop them thoroughly.
I'll try add some photographs of the insides of the unit and the
output particles to this review later.
Update (an aside): getting this shredder inspired me to clean a
bunch of old paper out of my desk and shred it. A lot of it was code
listings and technical docs that I no longer needed to retain, that
I'd received from various old consulting clients under nondisclosure
agreements that were still in force. I hadn't been thinking about
this when I bought the shredder, but this stuff alone makes me feel
that the expenditure for the shredder was justified. I'm confident
that the material is safely destroyed now. Using a lower-security
shredder would have left me with lingering doubts. The stuff wasn't
super-sensitive, but still, using this shredder makes me feel like I'm
doing a better job fulfilling my responsibility to my clients.
Update 2: I see that the specs on the Royal web page are
wrong. They may have been intended for a discontinued model. They
say the CIA 12x's shred size is 1/8*9/32" but the shreds are slightly
bigger than that. According to the instructions, which give both
metric and US units, the size is 1/8"*3/8" or 3*10mm. These aren't
exactly equal and the US units work out to 30.24 mm2
particles (slightly over 30mm2 but close enough for
pratical purposes). Also it specifies the speed as 36 feet/minute but
the instruction manual says 97 mm/sec (20 feet/minute) and the real
observed speed is somewhat slower. It's still perfectly fast enough
for this type of shredder. Finally the web page says the entry width
is 9 3/8" but it's really about 10 3/4", quite a bit better
than the "advertised" width. I'll call customer service and ask
about this, since I have some other questions too anyway.
Update 3:
Scandals involving paper shredders (AP wire reports).
Update 4:
Overclock your paper shredder!
Update 5:
NYT article on computer assisted shredded doc reassembly
Update 6:
Paper-shredder-reviews.com
is a new site with info about paper shredders, identity theft, the new
FACTA law, and a discussion forum. There's not much there yet (as of
2005-Nov-02) but maybe it will expand.
Attribute CIA-12X PS-80 Comment
Approx weight 50 lb 20 lb?
The CIA 12x feels like more shredder for your money--but it's bigger and harder to move.
Paper feed 12 sheets, 10.5" entry slot. The 12 sheet
rating is not an overestimate. It shreds stacks that thick while
slowing down only slightly.
6-8 sheets depending on where you look, about 9" entry width.
I shredded 7 sheets at once and the store unit could barely handle it.
CIA 12x wins. The extra capacity and wider slot
means you can shred your junk mail (in business envelope) without opening it.
Motor 10 amps 3 amps CIA 12x much more powerful, but see below.
Duty cycle 2 minutes on, 30 off, according to manual 10 minutes on, 10 off?
The CIA 12x's more powerful motor heats the unit up much faster--shred
too much stuff and the motor cuts out til it cools down
(actually about 10-15 minutes, not 30). This is a
drawback if you have a lot to shred, but really, you can generally
shred 150+ pages before thermal cutout, which is
enough for many types of use.
Crap resistance The CIA12x manual and top-deck emblem
caution against letting any paper clips into the shredder. The manual
says to remove all clips and staples, and that "the shredder will cut
staples, but this is not recommended". I feel it's ridiculous to
label a shredder as "heavy duty" and then require the user to sit
around removing staples, so I've been putting staples through and
nothing bad has happened so far.
The Powershred series are billed as able to accept staples and
small paper clips. The manual says not to shred any large paper
clips.
This is the PS80's big advantage over the CIA 12x. I
don't mind removing paper clips and have decided to not remove
staples. We'll see if I need any repairs after a while.
Basket capacity Bigger--lining the basket with an 13
gal kitchen trash bag works nicely. When the bag gets full, just lift
it out and put in another one. Not as big, and supposedly
less convenient to empty. Toss-up--the CIA 12x holds more
stuff but takes more space. The smaller CIA 12X residue also seems to pack
more densely (less air between the shreds). The 12x really seems able
to hold 300 sheets as claimed.
Particle size 3*10mm 4*20mm CIA 12x wins big here
and this is its main attraction
Noise Nice low-pitched growl
when in operation, not exactly quiet but
not too annoying. Louder but still not
too bad, as I recall. Both are silent when not
in operation, which is the most important thing for me.
Subjective value Pretty good Not so great
The CIA 12x seems like a much more solid and serious
shredder than the PS80.