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."

Comments

Uh-oh

[Profane MuthaFucka]

East Germany is fucked now.

Jigsaw Puzzle

[biocute]

Maybe someone could create an online jigsaw puzzle game, and let the internet people reassemble those docs.

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[ricklg]

Maybe a new distributed computing project--STASI@Home?

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[BluBrick]

STASI@Home is hardly a new project!

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[quigonn]

Ich jedenfalls heiße unsere neuen ostdeutschen Überlords willkommen.

Trust?

[JackieBrown]

"Many important documents are slumbering in these sacks"

And they will just re-shred the private, personal stuff, correct?

Re:Trust?

[timmarhy]

because you know, the american agencies don't torture or abduct people... oh wait a sec! they do!

Re:Trust?

[kestasjk]

Oh no, we'll be invading the privacy of some dead/near-death OAPs! And we should shred Mozart's letters too, what would Mozart say if he knew we were reading his letters about ####ing his cousin?!

Dead people don't care too much about their privacy; they're dead. Ask yourself "will I care about my privacy after I'm dead?" If you said yes you probably don't understand what death means.

Re:Trust?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were dead, I may not care about my personal information that would have affected me if I were alive. Though my personal information that may affect my family and friends who are still alive is another thing.

Re:Trust?

[Shihar]

That's because you're only a "bad guy" if you lose. No you are the "bad guy" if you have to build a fucking wall around your nation then station it with mines and machine guns to keep people in it. Last time I checked, western Europe and the US never had to build a fucking wall to keep people from fleeing their nation in terror.

Seriously people. Get a fucking grip and get over the moral relativism. It was bad. East Germany didn't throw build the Berlin wall for shits and giggles. People were not dancing in the street when it come down (on both sides) because it was the sad end of a merry social experience.

Human efforts?

[RealGrouchy]

Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks. Bah, just distribute them among nursing homes and tell the seniors it's a jigsaw puzzle.

They'll have it assembled before you can say "Matlock"!

- RG>

Iranian Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iranian revolutionaries did the same thing to CIA documents in the embassy. The re-assembled documents are available at www.memoryhole.org

In Soviet Russia

[biocute]

Secret police reassembles shredded researchers?

Why do this, you ask?

[u-bend]

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.

Re:Shredding not safe anymore?

[bitingduck]

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? I crosscut shred everything, then I put it into the worm composter for the worms to eat. I then feed the worms to pet ducks, and twice a year feed the ducks to guests. I send the guests on camping trips to grizzly country with slabs of bacon for pillows. By the time the bears are done there are only homeopathic traces of the original information from the documents.

Stasi files

[harmonica]

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.