WordNet
n. a bag into which secret documents are placed before being burned
Wikipedia
A burn bag is the informal name given to a container (usually a paper bag or some other waste receptacle) that holds sensitive or classified documents which are to be destroyed by fire or pulping after a certain period of time. The most common usage of burn bags is by government institutions, in the destruction of classified materials.
Destruction via burn bags is considered superior to shredding, because shredded documents may be reconstructed. After the capture of the United States embassy in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, shredded documents were turned over for painstaking manual reconstruction, which revealed to Iran some U.S. operations including spies. A picture of one such reassembled document can be seen at the George Washington University website. Today, scanners and computers can reconstruct shredded documents very quickly. Burn bags are designed to facilitate the destruction process by not requiring the removal of the items to be destroyed beforehand and by indicating if the items require special procedures.
Usage examples of "burn bag".
Mary Catherine folded the envelope, stuffed it into her bathrobe, closed up the burn bag, and called it a day.
Every time, he'd consider taking out the folded sheet of paper and ripping it to small bits before relegating it to the waste can and then the burn bag.
A handful at a time, he deposited them in the classified burn bag by Dunedin's desk.
By her smoke-shrouded lamp he read the message, and thrust it into the burn bag.
As the blokes left, they put every scrap of paper into a burn bag to be destroyed.
If General Pickering the prevaricator had accepted such training, he would an hour ago have been been finished with decrypting the current MAGIC, analyzing the current MAGIC, and shredding the ten pages of verbose Japanese bullshit and putting it in the burn bag.
You will then telephone Classified Files-the number's on the phone-and they will come and collect everything-maps, slides, notes, and the burn bag, or bags-and haul it off.
He threw some of these notes and paper in the Burn Bag for classified trash.
If they'd been classified, the papers would have been disposed of properly in a burn bag or a crosscut shredder that would have converted them into powder.
He helped Murdock collect all the scrap paper, shred it, and put it in a burn bag.