Police files are treated as secret for excellent reason. In some cases, especially when somebody goes to jail, witnesses and officers involved could be the victims of retaliation by perpetrators or associates of those sent to jail.
So, whenever thousands of top secret police files are accidentally distributed to the public, like, say, for example, shredded and used as confetti for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, it’s kind of a problem!
It’s not really clear how thousands of files containing sensitive information about witnesses, perpetrators, and members of the Nassau County police department got dumped on the heads of festive New Yorkers, but dumped it was, and the security breach was pretty major:
Upon closer inspection, the confetti contained information from Nassau County police incident reports plus the names, social security numbers and bank account information of Nassau County police officers and employees.
Other scraps included information about Mitt Romney’s motorcade to and from the October 16 presidential debate at Hofstra University in Nassau County, which borders New York City to the east on Long Island.
This is weird for two reasons. One, these documents aren’t supposed to be in Manhattan in the first place. Two, it’s not really clear why it was used as confetti: Official Macy’s confetti is the multicolored fun stuff. This is literally random piles of shredded crap somebody brought to the parade to throw at people.
In short, somebody at the shredding company Nassau County uses is going to jail. Also, you don’t need to be on Facebook to have your privacy bad-touched! Who knew?