Really? How much information do you think the US or China or Russia shreds? Do you really think they incinerate everything? Every building or location has an incinerator built into it? Now that I think of it, I have seen incinerator sites on news coverage of villages in Afghanistan and Iraq where all the bad guys line up to get rid of their documents. Kind of sucks for them though when someone unsuspectingly busts in on their 'hide out' before they make their incinerator run....

Right, it is the 21st century, but not for everyone in all parts of the world....paper consumption has gone through the roof with the 'digital' age and 'paperless' work environments. You're missing the fact of the matter which is that there is an abundance of digital and physical media. BOTH of which can be 'destroyed' and reconstructed at least to some degree depending on how thorough the destruction process was. I don't envision the bad guys the US is chasing are running around using iPads (although I'm sure at least some have them at higher echelons) documenting all their plans and transferring files to worker bees with the instructions...

Read the description and objectives of the challenge again. They are looking for something innovative not the same old, same old. Lets see, the Iran Hostage Crisis began in 1979 and then destroyed documents were posted in 1982. Yes, that is super 'timely'...We can assume the Iranian gov't looked at them before they published at large, but its still a safe bet it took them several months up to a couple of years. Of course, employing US carpet weavers would be a boost for this economy, oh wait, sorry, thats not really a skill set we have in abundance so we'd just offshore it back to some other country anyway... Same thing for the German Stasi. They've literally got warehouses of shredded documents they have gone/are still going through. If people would actually read what this challenge is about they would see its objectives are not found in either of these historical examples. The objective is trying to find methods for quickly, e.g. hours up to a few days, reconstructing documents at least to the point of gaining information that can be acted on while it is still relevant, again in hours to a few days.