How do you pass some information on to someone in a secure manner?

This is just a thought experiment. I don’t have any nefarious deeds to keep secret, honest! But read on, I can think of a possible situation that many people could find themselves in at some point in the future.

I was just wondering about how you communicate some information without leaving an incriminating trail. It comes off the back of someone going to jail for a letter he sent 25 years ago. He was tracked down by DNA on the gum! That was a very serious case and I have no sympathy for that person but it shows how easy it is to leave a trail for future tracing by technologies we can’t even really imagine today. Also, the recent emails trails from HBGary Federal showing possible criminal activity. More importantly, there are calls to investigate some of the people involved with HBGary Federal that should have known that some of the activities were likely illegal but apparently did nothing to show that they were not happy with some of the proposals, so now you have to create trails to show that you are specifically not involved if you get a problem email sent to you! And now we’ve got a video of John Galliano’s racist, drunken rant (again, no sympathy there!) but you get the point. Actually, what I was thinking about is a situation where someone emails you and says something that might be a technical illegality, you personally don’t think it is a big deal but you ‘officially’ want to distance yourself in case it comes back to try and bite you one day. You could send a reply pointing out the problems but then phone the person to explain the actual reason for your reply rather than just leave it and look like a snooty goody two shoes, but that is probably recorded and stored somewhere. So, you probably have to meet the person face to face.

The problem today is that recording devices are much, much more common than before. Most phones have a voice recording feature nowadays and directional microphones are much cheaper as well, so you wouldn’t have to be the NSA to eavesdrop on and record a conversation any more. I’m not even sure that whispering in the ear would be safe. It seems to me that you would need to give the person something written down and you watch them read it and then destroy the paper. All well and good but then you have to be careful about producing the paper and getting rid of it! You might think about using your computer and then printing it out but that is fraught with problems too! Seems like you’d have to go back to pen and paper, or a manual typewriter. But you’d still have to think about destroying the ribbon from the typewriter and if you used a pen you’d need to be sure that the underlying surface didn’t also keep an impression. Then destroying the paper would probably require burning and where can you easily burn things nowadays AND you’d need to make sure the resulting ash was broken up small enough not to have anything reconstructed. It all seems a big, big hassle.

I know, I’m being paranoid, but am I missing a much easier way to do it?

To be honest, if I was communicating with someone I didn’t know well, I’d reply with my reservations and leave it at that. If it was someone I knew well, I’d probably be meeting them regularly and I’d just mention it to them. I’m sure I’d have enough respect for them not to be thinking that they go about secretly recording all their conversations!