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."

Uh-oh

[Profane MuthaFucka]

East Germany is fucked now.

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>

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[ricklg]

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

In Soviet Russia

[biocute]

Secret police reassembles shredded researchers?

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[Anonymous Coward]

The researchers want to see the pieces reassembled into the original documents, not into a crude version of goatse.cx.

whos winning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey i havent been reading the news recently. does anyone know the outcome of WWII. last i heard the US was ahead by 2

scanning 16,000 sacks of shredded paper...

[mythar]

should take a few hundred years. after that, the computer will be able to reassemble all of the documents in 30 seconds. whew!

Re:whos winning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey i havent been reading the news recently. does anyone know the outcome of WWII. last i heard the US was ahead by 2

Anne Frank lost.

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:Jigsaw Puzzle

[BluBrick]

STASI@Home is hardly a new project!

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.

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[quigonn]

Ich jedenfalls heiße unsere neuen ostdeutschen Überlords willkommen.

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[CmdrGravy]

Duh ! You do realise the documents are written in German don't you and I haven't seen anything written in German on the web so far so who's going to be able to read it ? Who actually uses German nowadays !

Re:Iranian Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

It must have slipped his mind.

Re:Shredding not safe anymore?

[nietsch]

I guess part of the documents you have to dispose of are the guest lists of your twice yearly duck-fest?

It would only be homeopathetic if you follow the correct diluting procedure: bang the container 10 times on a leather cushion to mix, throw away the contents and fill with new alcohol. So you'd have to let your guests eat the duck, beat them up with a leather cushion, make them give up their stomach content, fill them with alcohol and beat them up again. Rinse lather and repeat for more potent medicine...

Re:Uh-oh

[eneville]

East Germany is fucked now.

in soviet russia file shreds you!!

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[CmdrGravy]

Gosh really ! Next you'll be telling me the Germans have a well developed and world renowned sense of humour too ?