Printing Secrets At The CIA

To prevent the PDB from being intercepted digitally, the job arrives at the in-plant in hard copy form. All equipment used to produce the PDB is taken offline, powered down to erase all traces of previous jobs on the hard drive, then turned back on. Each page is scanned in, and the exact number of required pages are printed. Any extras are shredded and that material is returned to the customer along with the finished job. Then the machines are taken down again, reconnected to the production LAN and rebooted.