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."

Jigsaw Puzzle

[biocute]

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

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

Re:Trust?

[shaitand]

Exactly, why is these guys having the information any better than German secret police? Most of this information is probably private and better off lost.

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:Uh-oh

[tezbobobo]

You could be right. Apparently, according to a radio report I heard some months ago now, this program and evidence has been in place for some time and the reason they haven't done anything is because of intese political pressure.

Shredding not safe anymore?

[erice]

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?

Iran Tackled the Same Problem

[Comatose51]

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 [wired.com]? 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...

Re:Hmmm...

[owlnation]

But since the main reason files were shredded was to hide the identities and crimes committed by state employees and ordinary people who spied against their neighbours and caused them to be tortured and killed, this has the potential for explosive consequences.

Yes, it does indeed. Note that nearly one person in every four in East Berlin was Stasi, or an informant of some sort. However, very few have ever been identified. There will, for certain, be currently prominent or influential people listed in those documents who spied for the Stasi.

Piecing these together is going to make a lot of people very nervous - as indeed it should.

Re:Trust?

[owlnation]

And as a matter of fact, not all the Stasi files are in Germany. The CIA swiped a significant number of them when The Wall fell. They returned some of them, but still retain quite a few.

So yes, I agree, evil / trust is a merely question of perspective.

Das Leben der Anderen

[fishbowl]

If you get a chance to see Das Leben der Anderen ("The Lives of Others", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/ [imdb.com]), 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.

Re:Intense political pressure?

[slashbob22]

So, who is pressuring the Fraunhofner(sp?) Institute not to do this? Did Germany's Communist Party gain seats last election?

IIRC there has been a lot of pressure (political or legal) by those who could be implicated. I believe many of these records contain information on civilian informers who could now be Politicians and other influential people who wouldn't want this information to come out.

Re:Shredding not safe anymore?

[thogard]

Putting it back together once scanned is easy. The hard part is scanning it.
You start by run length encoding all the edges. If you do it right, you get the same 32 bit number even if your scaling is off by a bit. Then you build a data mesh and match up all the edges that have the same edge code. You can also build edge codes using a technique much like how computers recognise Morse code.
The real trick is the scanning each bit clearly without any overlay.
There are places that will do this for you. A few years ago it was about $10k per cubic foot for fine cross cut.

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 [imdb.com].

Finnish politicians feeling the heat too

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

[KnuthKonrad]

Because you haven't seen anything written in German on the web doesn't necessarily mean there isn't anything written in German at all. Especially given the fact that ".de is currently the most popular ccTLD in terms of number of registrations, and is second after .com among all TLDs." [wikipedia.org]

Not to mention german .at and .ch or even german .com, .net, .org, .eu, etc. pages.