Securely disposing of records is so hard that even the NSA has had trouble doing it.

The NSA had an incinerator in their old Arlington Hall facility that was designed to reduce top secret crypto materials and such to ash. Someone discovered that it wasn’t in fact working.

Although they buried the “palm sized” chunks so well that they couldn’t find most of them, still I love any story where:

for years the screen at the top of the stack had a habit of burning through and then it would spew partially burned classified COMSEC and SIGINT materials round and about the Post and surrounding neighborhood.