US Fish and Wildlife Service employees putting protective gear into a burn bag for disposal.

A burn bag is the informal name given to a container (usually a paper bag or some other trash receptacle) that holds sensitive or classified documents which are to be destroyed by fire after a certain period of time. The most common usage of burn bags is by government institutions, in the destruction of materials deemed Top Secret or Classified. The USFWS logo The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is a unit of the United States Department of the Interior that is dedicated to managing and preserving wildlife. ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Classified information is secret information to which access is restricted by law or corporate rules to a particular hierarchical class of people. ...

Burn bags are considered superior to shredding, because shredded documents may be reconstructed. After the capture of the United States embassy in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, shredded documents were turned over for painstaking manual reconstruction, which revealed to Iran some US operations including spies.^[1] Today, scanners and computers can reconstruct shredded documents very quickly. Look up Shredding in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A diplomatic mission is a group of people from one nation state present in another nation state to represent the sending state in the receiving State. ... Map of Iran and surrounding lands, showing location of Tehran View from Jamaran looking southwest toward Elahiyeh, Jordan, and Shemiran districts of Tehran. ... A defaced Great Seal of the United States at the former US embassy, Tehran, Iran, as it appears today The Iran hostage crisis was a 444-day (about 14 months) period during which student proxies of the new Iranian regime held hostage 52 diplomats and citizens of the United States... The term scanner has several meanings: In radio, a scanner is a device for searching for and receiving radio broadcasts. ... A Lego RCX Computer is an example of an embedded computer used to control mechanical devices. ...

Usage

In government institutions

Burn bags are generally associated with govermental organizations like the CIA and NSA, due to the classified nature of their work. Most other governmental organizations have some form of burn bag system to destroy documents deemed of a Top Secret, Secret, Classified, or other similar nature. The CIA Seal The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an American intelligence agency, responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and reporting such information to the various branches of the U.S. Government. ... NSA can stand for: National Security Agency of the USA The British Librarys National Sound Archive This page concerning a three-letter acronym or abbreviation is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Secrecy is the condition of hiding information from others. ... Classified information is secret information to which access is restricted by law or corporate rules to a particular hierarchical class of people. ...

Burn bags are mostly used to satisfy destruction of articles pursuent under Executive Order 12958 section 1.4, in part: In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12958 which created tough new standards for the process of classifying documents and led to an unprecedented effort to declassify millions of pages from the U.S. diplomatic and national security history. ...

Classified information must fall under one of the following categories:

1.4 (a) Military plans, weapons systems, or operations;

1.4 (b) Foreign government information;

1.4 (c) Intelligence activities, sources or methods or cryptology;

1.4 (d) Foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States including confidential sources;

1.4 (e) Scientific, technological or economic matters relating to the national security;

1.4 (f) United States Government programs for safeguarding nuclear materials or facilities; or

1.4 (g) Vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems, installations, projects or plan relating to the national security.

1.4 (h) weapons of mass destruction

The order was subsequently revised under Executive Order 13292. Wikisource has original text related to this article: Executive Order 13292 Executive Order 13292 concerns classified national security information of the United States government and prescribes a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information, including information relating to defense against transnational terrorism. ...

Overseas military outposts and Diplomatic missions frequently have emergency disposal procedures in place for the rapid burning of classified materials. These often include special burn bags with built-in thermite charges. Seal on the building of German Embassies. ... A thermite mixture using Iron Oxide A thermite reaction is a type of aluminothermic reaction in which aluminium metal is oxidized by the oxide of another metal, most commonly iron oxide. ...

Haz-Mat Useage

Burn bags can also refer to bags that contain Haz-Mat protective gear after inspection of sources deemed hazardous. A hazardous material (HAZMAT) is any solid, liquid, or gas that can cause harm to humans and other living organisms due to being radioactive, flammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, a biohazard, an oxidizer, an asphyxiant, or capable of causing severe allergic reactions. ...

In private businesses

Document Destruction Companies have rarely used burning in disposing of documents, mainly opting to shred material before disposal. However, due to the possibility that shredded material can be reconstructed, and recent increases in identity theft and corporate espionage, some services have started to offer destruction by burning instead of disposal into landfills. Identity theft (or identity fraud) is committing a crime, tort or other harmful act by deliberately assuming the identity (or some part or parts thereof) of someone other than the person doing the harmful act. ... Espionage is the practice of obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential (spying) without the permission of the holder of the information. ... Landfill is a waste disposal site for the deposit of the waste onto or into land including: internal waste disposal sites (i. ...

In pop culture

• Burn bags are used prominently in the movie Spy Game. Nathan Muir uses the bag not to destroy documents, but to covertly smuggle documents critical to his plans.

• A similar document destruction system (sans burn bags) called the "memory hole" is used in the Ministry of Truth (Newspeak: Minitrue) in the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• Burn Bags are featured in the works of many military and espionage authors. The works of Tom Clancy and W.E.B. Griffin feature them prominently.

This article is about the movie. ... The memory hole, as in the phrase Going down the memory hole, refers to George Orwells novel, 1984. ... Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ... Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), much better known by the pen name George Orwell (pronounced ), was a British author and journalist. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Tom Clancy Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. ... W.E.B. Griffin (born William Edmund Butterworth III on November 10, 1929) is a writer of military and detective fiction with some thirty novels in five series published under that name. ...

References

Inline

Government sites

• Department of Energy Office of Administration | Headquarters Waste Disposal Program
• NOAA Office of Security Education Refresher Briefing (Microsoft Office PowerPoint Presentation) HTML version

PowerPoint redirects here. ...

Non-government sites

• Nixon Logs Burn to Ashes
• Everything2 definition