In 2012 Hollywood decided to make the movie Argo, starring Ben Affleck, about the 1979 Iranian Hostage event when the U.S. Embassy was overthrown. One of the key scenes in the movie involved the need to destroy sensitive information very quickly, embassy employees are frantically feeding classified documents into an SEM disintegrator.
SEM products were also featured in footage from an ABC news story, “Rare look inside the U.S. Embassy Ravaged by Iran”, about a visit to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, at the 1:11 mark of the story, the reporter states that “even some of the equipment used in 1979 is still here.” A close up then focuses on the SEM disintegrator.
In the Movie “Mad Money”, a story about three Federal Reserve Bank employees whose role is to destroy old, worn-out currency, Queen Latifah, Diane Keaton and Katie Holmes are shown feeding the currency into an SEM disintegrator, of course they “‘borrowed” some of it before it entered the system.
As a supplier of shredding equipment since 1967, SEM has placed shredding systems in many sensitive locations both here and abroad. High security agencies within the Federal Government and many World Wide Central Banks throughout the globe have active systems that have been functioning for up to 20 or 30 years.
In addition to shredding/disintegration, SEM is also mentioned in the very recent movie 13 Hours, the story about 9-11-12 terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy/diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. In one of the scenes, while under attack, embassy employees were erasing sensitive data on magnetic media (hard drives) using an SEM degausser.
In one of the most widely witnessed scenes in recent history, the 1975 rooftop evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, an SEM disintegrator, located under a canopy on the roof is in plain view. During a recent visit to that site, a U.S. Govt. employee took a photo of the unit which is still located on the roof. He also removed the model/serial number plate and sent it to us. He may not be 100% sure, but he believes that after 40 years, the unit is still operational.
As the inventor of the disintegrator and a leading supplier of high security destruction and sanitization solutions to the Federal Government and fortune 100 commercial customers for the past 50 years, our product line has evolved to keep up with the ways in which information is stored. While disintegrators are still a viable and effective solution, our product line has evolved into a complete line of solutions to erase and shred the newest forms of information storage media. From magnetic media like hard disk drives and back-up tapes to optical disks to solid state technology, SEM has developed and introduced a comprehensive line of media end-of-life solutions to meet the information security demands of today.