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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?
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.
The Iranian revolutionaries did the same thing to CIA documents in the embassy. The re-assembled documents are available at www.memoryhole.org
Secret police reassembles shredded researchers?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
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
should take a few hundred years. after that, the computer will be able to reassemble all of the documents in 30 seconds. whew!
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?
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
Piecing these together is going to make a lot of people very nervous - as indeed it should.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
But are the computer algorithms also "pretty"?
Are they heavily "optimized"?
Or "lazy heuristic" algorithms?
Maybe they're inauspicious and pink