Perilous

It’s known as the Shredder Challenge. The military’s think tank of crack technology researchers called DARPA launched a curious contest earlier this year that few people thought was actually possible: Develop a computer algorithm that can aid in reassembling shredded documents. The idea was to figure out how war fighters could extract useful intelligence from them as quickly as possible. 

A San Francisco-based team actually succeeded and won a $50,000 prize for their efforts. It wasn’t magic. All the winning technology can do is “suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification,” meaning grunts still have to get ink on their hands. But the team did manage to build algorithms that could assist in piecing together more than 10,000 puzzle parts of shredded documentation, according to DARPA.   

So why couldn’t this same technology be used to stymie attempts by Wall Street executives and financial regulators to destroy documents that may paint a picture of wrongdoing? You might recall that shredded records were a major feature of the Enron energy scandal. And how about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s habit of destroying records that could be used as evidence against alleged white-collar criminals? 

Image courtesy Kristof Creative