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Shredded Secret Police Files Being Reassembled
An anonymous reader writes "German researchers at the Frauenhofer Institute said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders."
East Germany is fucked now.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Maybe someone could create an online jigsaw puzzle game, and let the internet people reassemble those docs.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
"Many important documents are slumbering in these sacks"
And they will just re-shred the private, personal stuff, correct?
The requested URL (it/07/05/10/0024233.shtml) was not found.
The Stasi live!
They'll have it assembled before you can say "Matlock"!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
why didn't they also burn them if they really wanted them gone? C'mon they could make a person vanish, but they can manage to successfully destroy paper?
We are all just people.
Isn't this the same company whose name is virtually synonymous with music piracy? AFAIK these are the guys who invented the DRM-free MP3 format which is now a major enabling factor for music piracy in the US. The RIAA (and by consequence the US government) must hate these guys, but now provoking the enemity of the German secret police is just asking for it.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Unshred@home, sign me up.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The Iranian revolutionaries did the same thing to CIA documents in the embassy. The re-assembled documents are available at www.memoryhole.org
Is it just curiosity, or is there some real practical reason for doing this?
So where can we see these documents? What, they are hiding them?
Blame Canada!
Secret police reassembles shredded researchers?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
I, for one, welcome our new Gestapo-Like-East-German-Shredded-Secret-Document- Reassembling...oberherren...
I think that the pursuit of historical documentation and a better understanding of a strange and dangerous period of the near past should justify the project alone. As someone who grew up as an American in that neck of the woods, pre and post Soviet demise, it's going to be really interesting to see what they find.
u-bend
... we have a shit load of bags marked "Bush Administration" that are in need of their talents. =)
[...]vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders[...]
Wonder if the purpose is to find out what East Germany was doing for posterity's sake? Or might the purpose be for some future use?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
It will take many many years by hand.
Western politicians and others are totally protected from any info found on them.
The CIA got the list to world wide spy network.
Some info on http://cryptome.org/cia-foi-stasi.htm
I really hope it will make the work faster but will be very surprised if any 'real' info is ever released.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Hey i havent been reading the news recently. does anyone know the outcome of WWII. last i heard the US was ahead by 2
should take a few hundred years. after that, the computer will be able to reassemble all of the documents in 30 seconds. whew!
Holy shit, all those cliches about "harder than unscrambling an egg" are being made obsolete by computers. Can I also have my ass unkicked?
Table-ized A.I.
This could be a little disturbing, if it works. How long before the technology trickles down to the identity thief around the corner? We are now told to shred everything. What happens when shredding is not enough?
Time to buy shreader stock because all the shreader companies are going to have to make new models that turn paper into powder, creating a new market just like obsolete PC's. Then when inventors figure out how to unpowder paper, these companies will sell the next atomizer model.
Table-ized A.I.
The Document Crematory!! Incinerates all of your sensitive documents, transforming them into completely unreadable ash.
Did anyone else read the Wired Article about how the CIA got some Americans out of Iran using a fake cover story about producing a Sci-Fi movie in Iran? After the Iranians took our embassy during their revolution, they hired a bunch of rug weavers to reassemble our shredded documents according to article. Wonder how successful they were...
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Seemed a little far-fetched to me, even for Vinge.
I read Usenet for the articles.
So, who is pressuring the Fraunhofner(sp?) Institute not to do this? Did Germany's Communist Party gain seats last election?
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
A use for the Minority Report style interface. Something tells me they aren't using Silverlight though!
Why is the creator of MP3 shredding documents? Oh... wrong institute. Never mind... nothing to see here. Move along.
Mark
Now we've got something for Cheney to do after we've impeached him: dole out the tape while they reassemble all the evidence he's shredded the past 7 years.
Then we can hang him for treason.
--
make install -not war
So say you had a document that was shredded the standard way, like strips of paper.
Put 'em in a hopper, and have an assembly line with a narrow page scanner scan 'em up and store them on a hard drive.
Then write an app that scans the left & right edges of the paper. Look for a similar pattern of edges(ink) on any other strip. Try to put 'em together and see if it forms words. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sounds like a jigsaw puzzle.
Would that un-shred them?
If you get a chance to see Das Leben der Anderen ("The Lives of Others", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/), definitely do not miss it. It is a slightly fantastic conflation of plausible events tied together with a story about fictional characters, but it is said, by people who lived in DDR at the time, to be chillingly accurate (though not without problems, it's a movie after all.)
I'd certainly enjoy hearing from anyone who lived in the DDR, who has seen this film; particularly if they had personal interaction with the STASI.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
hi,
impressed to see this so early in the comments. This shows how damn big intellect Slashdoters have. Ohh.. wait is not coming from deep dough sources... "Wired" ehem... I take back what I just said. I didn't know that Wired mentioned it, I skimmed through that crap article. Yeah USA "Panicking officials" did shred tons of documents. However they didn't "hire a bunch of rug weavers", they were University students. They were successful up to a point, which end up in TOMES instead of books, lol. They were some hard files and they mentioned something along these lines: "The rest is too difficult with current methods which needs complicated algorithm. We leave them for future generations when the technology is available".
Could be interesting to find out if they are aware of this news and whether they would use it to re-assemble the rest of documents. I wonder what's in those documents.
After this USA changed the protocol for this kind of situation.
By the way, on a technical note. How do you use the algorithm with a shredded pile of paper? Are the shreds scanned or what?
A "Frauenhofer" Institute doesn't exist.
Retarded.
I know for a fact that there exists shredders that will turn a piece of paper into particles smaller than a grain of salt. The Canadian Military uses one. I'm sure your respective intelligence agencies probably have a few as well.
The evil villain types never seem to learn a good lesson. In the cartoons, the villain captures the hero, tells him an evil secret and discloses all necessary information on how to stop the evil plan once the hero undoubtedly escapes. In the real world, evil villains have people sift through trash and recreate shredded documents and then shred the documents to hide the evidence. In this case, all they really needed to do was have on last book-burning-bonfire for "old times" sake and toss in a few documents as well. Seriously... matches are so much cheaper and more effective than shredders. Heck with that... I'll get one of my henchman to rub some sticks together and save my 79 cents.
I hope that the people reassembling the files don't misuse them in the same way that the East German government did. Wouldn't it be better to permanently destroy the files since they shouldn't have been compiled by the East German government in the first place?
not cross-cut but just in strips like old shredders used to do. That means the job is infinitely easier.
Also, mix your bin around. Add multiple papers, and take out others so all the pieces are not in the same place or thrown out at the same time. The chances a thief can economically put together those shreds from a vast assortment drops to almost nil when it's not guaranteed the entire paper is even there.
Unless you are Bill Gates, you are not interesting enough to waste time on. The thief will move on to easier targets who take no precautions (as in not shredding period).
They are too busy making cubic boat loads of cash with all the insider biz info they collect and collate. No need to get your hands dirty when you can just subcontract out all the messy work with your pocket change. In fact, how is that buying up your own bonds racket going?
I was curious on the Stasi after enjoying the recent(USwise) release of the "Lives of Others" It won an academy award. Anyway, Funders book covers this topic of the sacks of shredded documents. The statistics were rediculous and 100's of years would be needed at the rate they were getting through the sacks. Kindof like the Blechley park people, recruitment seeks special skills, in this case, people who enjoyed board puzzles were hired.
The book is a good read, this systematic control they had on a society from cradle to grave produced some very odd people and behaviours.
Check out the film also.
Hedley
The sacks may contain clues to Puzzle people (according to Anna Funder's book Stasiland). The first files the Stasi shred are the most incriminating. Remember, these fine folks made some of the dissidents back then 'dissapear'. Which files do you think would be into the shredder at the time of the wall coming down? Also realize that they wanted to shred all of it, but they burned out the shredders with the sheer volume. With about 60-70 people per watcher in East Germany, there was a lot of info in a lot of files about a lot of people!
Hedley
besides former Stasi collabporators/agents/etc. (as pointed out by several posts above mine), I bet (if East Germany intelligence was as good as it was supposed to be) there might be some Western leaders as well who would not like their secret files to be made public...
Paul B.
...that fire is what you use to destroy documents properly
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
there might be some Western leaders as well who would not like their secret files to be made public...
No "might" necessary, there are Western leaders and others who don't want their Stasi (secret police) files public. Former West German chancellor Kohl successfully sued to keep his files under wraps.
That's for the simple reason that those files often contain the most private details of what the Stasi had assembled using bugs and other means. Besides, nobody can easily check what is true and what they might have falsified in those files. After all, we're talking about a totalitarian regime which shot people trying to leave the country illegally.
However, all that doesn't mean that there won't be investigations if German authorities find something interesting in those files. So some people do have to fear that their past surfaces, but not from publication of the files.
Movie recommendation on the topic: this year's Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards, The Lives of Others.
We in Finland have some lists given to us by US intelligence authorities. For what reasons, the public doesn't know. Probably to test the functioning of the state police if they are worthy to be taken into the more inner circles of spook-world.
The lists are locked up. Only one guy, Alpo Rusi, was (falsely) accused of being an informant for Stasi, but the real culprit was his brother. Alpo Rusi has not been able to get the lists out in the clear, even though he did sue the state. The state is still naïvely saying that one of the mentioned lists does not exist (when everyone knows it does).
The lists stay in the safe of the security police SUPO.
People who spy against their own country should be named and brought to trial. Then again, the list is likely to be very full of the old-school movers and shakers of Finnish politics and economics, so of course they want to keep it hidden.
I would imagine this being the case in Germany too. Too much black information about the powers that be.
It's sad. If you are powerful and/or rich enough, you can avoid responsibility of your actions.
They're very anal about documenting frickin' _everything_, generating _huge_ amounts of paper. While one sheet of paper might burn nicely, burning several _tons_ of the stuff is a different matter altogether.
Back when i was in the (german) army, i was in the IT department of an reconnaisance/listening post.
They had a shredder in the basement that was twenty years old, but still more sophisticated:
It first crosscut the paper, and after that there was a stage that was connected with the water-tap. It wet the pieces and mixed them down.
The end result was some plaster-like grey pile in a bucket.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Try burning your phone book if you don't have access to a furnace, Sherlock.
The correct name of the institute is Fraunhofer, not Frauenhofer.
sometimes i feel tired - but dead?
...
not that i care too much about what i did back then. the pictures are anoter story; but at least i had some more hair
The Berlin wall ran *right* through the centre of Berlin. Through the middle of houses even. How else would you enforce a national border like that other than with a wall? Go see what's left of it some time.
The wall itself wasn't to prevent people fleeing in terror, not initially anyway, but to prevent economic migration of people from the increasingly poor east to the wealthier west. My partner, an East German, reckons the ignorance and hyperbole about East Germany is laughable.
Deleted
Ah, but life/death is not a boolean for some. It's more of a fractal.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
People have been manually trying to recreate these files for years. Automation is the obvious next step, albeit not necessarily a simple one.
One use for them is trying to track down people that 'disappeared'.
The book Stasiland which mentions these efforts is superb, well worth reading.
.... Secret Shredders reassembles police and researchers
Eclipse PDE and Me
As long as Frauenhoffer give those people PORN in reward, previous litterature evidence shows that it would work very well.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
dooh forget it ...
Read radical news here
As others have suggested, this can have various political consequences. For those that don't believe so... take a look at what is happening in Poland to communist-era "collaborators" / "spies". Poland is on a witch-hunt.
Government ministers have lost their positions from this, even Warsaw's Archbishop resigned over the matter.
It is likely that these documents will cause similar problems in Germany.
But are the computer algorithms also "pretty"?
Are they heavily "optimized"?
Or "lazy heuristic" algorithms?
Maybe they're inauspicious and pink
why shredding was considered such an effective means of destroying documents. Hey lets cut the paper into equally sized strips, then just toss it into the garbage. Seems quite conceivable any truly interested party could design a device for scanning a mountain of shredded paper. Ever seen how they make hotdogs? Or any other assembly line product. From that point it's only time and electricity before things get sorted out. You have what I would assume is a fairly parallelizable operation that these fancy new multi-core processors could attack pretty well. The algorithms developed for image recognition are getting better and better. I had wondered why the Enron paper-shredding was such an daunting barrier. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to give something like that a shot, if anyone really cared to seek justice in the first place. Shouldn't we hold on to shredded docs in high profile cases, the big corporate and political ones, in case some time in the future we had the tech to tackle this problem. People would probably just start burning things in response to such measures, but burning large quantities of paper is quite a bit more conspicuous an operation. And that above post about crosscutting was brilliant!
The NSA is not in any way like the secret police. More like government hackers. Also, you might want to look up (the declassified portions of) USSID 18. I'll get you started:
1 .htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/07-1
Of course, most of the protections that keep the NSA from spying on US persons can be circumvented by a determined executive branch. Fortunately the people actually at the NSA complained about the recent abuses, which is part of the reason anyone knows about abuses at all.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
It's difficult to choose between modding this "troll" or "insightful".
Rude vs. completely correct.
Sigh.
Hey, that technology should be 20 years old...the movie version of 1984 had insta-poof document disposals in it. Or did that prediction not come true? Must be the only one.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
were rather successful at this sort of thing.
In communist Germany, secret files shred you!