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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."
The Iranian revolutionaries did the same thing to CIA documents in the embassy. The re-assembled documents are available at www.memoryhole.org
I think you mean http://www.thememoryhole.org/
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Um, no. The retention of the assembled file allows you to request your STASI file. When you do the personal information pertaining to others, except STASI and their informers, is blanked out.
People aren't too concerned about the privacy aspects of the German government retaining the STASI files. They are no longer being maintained and, more importantly, no longer being acted upon. If you can't find a job in unified Germany it is because of economics, not because of your friend/neighbour/teacher's mutterings to the STASI. Similarly, any people following you are criminal stalkers, not the government. And no one cares which way your TV antenna points, let alone photographs it and adds it to your file.
Germany is pretty unique in allowing citizens access to its once-secret police files. No other Eastern European country does this. Even the files maintained by the US FBI on figures like Rev Dr Martin Luther King have not been opened to Dr King's familty to the extent of the STASI archives. Some, like Russia, continue to maintain and act upon the files (although this was never done to the manic extent as happened in the GDR).
For English readers I'd highly recommend "Stasiland" by Anna Funder.
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.
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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.