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

East Germany is fucked now.

Re:Uh-oh

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.

Re:Intense political pressure?

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

Er, what do you think happened to people who were part of the former power structure in east germany?

Based on what I've heard from someone who lived in east germany at the time, there was a mad scramble to gain advantage when east germany fell, and despite some sort of attempts to hold the "bad guys" to account, there were many cases of things not quite working they way they were supposed to -- e.g. people successfully hiding their past, and even worse, people cynically using the system to gain personal advantage (e.g., denounce your [innocent] neighbor, grab his property in the confusion).

As a result, there are almost certainly many people in positions of power in germany today who would rather like to keep details of the east german past hidden.

Stasi files

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].

Jigsaw Puzzle

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

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

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

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

STASI@Home is hardly a new project!

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

Ich jedenfalls heiße unsere neuen ostdeutschen Überlords willkommen.

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

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

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

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

Yes, because bored people surfing could re-assemble documents much faster and more reliably than computers ever will. And let's not forget that the entire internet should be able to freely read detailed documentation on the private lives of ordinary people, many of which are still alive today. Perfect idea!

Re:Jigsaw Puzzle

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

Trust?

"Many important documents are slumbering in these sacks"

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

Re:Trust?

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.

Re:Trust?

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?

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?

'Oh no, we'll be invading the privacy of some dead/near-death OAPs!'

We are talking about East Germany, not Nazi Germany. There could be dirt on people in their twenties in those files.

Re:Trust?

You know what else I love? I love the way they are the vile communist evil secret east german police who spied on their citizens and foreign leaders. Yet our own wonderful friendly giant FBI keeps every scrap of information it gathers on private citizens and the CIA does the same for foreign leaders. Hell, our own secret police (the NSA) probably does both.

Re:Trust?

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

Re:Trust?

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.

Re:Trust?

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.

Israel, the US/Mexican border etc

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.

 

Re:Trust?

According to whom? The NSA isn't supposed to do police stuff. The last time I heard of the NSA publicly commenting on what they do or don't do was when a congressional oversight committee was convened to investigate whether they have been wiretapping citizens without warrants. The NSA's only comment to the oversight committee was that subjecting itself to oversight would risk national security. They didn't turn over paperwork or show up for the hearing.

I don't recall there being much media coverage after that, it just sort of went away.

Human efforts?

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>

shredding is so last week....

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?

asking for trouble

Isn't this the same company whose name is virtually synonymous with music piracy? AFAIK these are the guys who invented the DRM-free MP3 format which is now a major enabling factor for music piracy in the US. The RIAA (and by consequence the US government) must hate these guys, but now provoking the enemity of the German secret police is just asking for it.

sweet

Unshred@home, sign me up.

Iranian Revolution

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

Re:Iranian Revolution

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/ [thememoryhole.org]

Why are these documents important?

Is it just curiosity, or is there some real practical reason for doing this?

hide the shreds?

So where can we see these documents? What, they are hiding them?

In Soviet Russia

Secret police reassembles shredded researchers?

Why do this, you ask?

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.

Hmmm...

[...]vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders[...]

Wonder if the purpose is to find out what East Germany was doing for posterity's sake? Or might the purpose be for some future use?

Re:Hmmm...

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.

Will we get to read more known knowns -faster?

Few fun parts to this.
It will take many many years by hand.
Western politicians and others are totally protected from any info found on them.
The CIA got the list to world wide spy network.
Some info on http://cryptome.org/cia-foi-stasi.htm [cryptome.org]

I really hope it will make the work faster but will be very surprised if any 'real' info is ever released.

scanning 16,000 sacks of shredded paper...

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

Unscramble an Egg

Holy shit, all those cliches about "harder than unscrambling an egg" are being made obsolete by computers. Can I also have my ass unkicked?
         

Shredding not safe anymore?

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?

Re:Shredding not safe anymore?

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:Shredding not safe anymore?

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...

Shreader stock

Time to buy shreader stock because all the shreader companies are going to have to make new models that turn paper into powder, creating a new market just like obsolete PC's. Then when inventors figure out how to unpowder paper, these companies will sell the next atomizer model.

New from Staples...

The Document Crematory!! Incinerates all of your sensitive documents, transforming them into completely unreadable ash.

Iran Tackled the Same Problem

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...

Rainbow's End

Reminds me of that somewhat bizarre subplot in Vinge's latest novel "Rainbow's End" where there was a big project to digitize all the university libraries, and some guy came up with the fastest way to do it: just throw all the books into a giant shredder, and then gave lots of cameras taking pictures of every last bit from every andle as it comes blowing out the other end...then re-assemble it all in a computer.

Seemed a little far-fetched to me, even for Vinge.

Finally...

A use for the Minority Report style interface. Something tells me they aren't using Silverlight though!

MP3 secrets?

Why is the creator of MP3 shredding documents? Oh... wrong institute. Never mind... nothing to see here. Move along.

Cheney's Dicked

Now we've got something for Cheney to do after we've impeached him: dole out the tape while they reassemble all the evidence he's shredded [crooksandliars.com] the past 7 years.

Then we can hang him for treason.

jigsaw puzzle?

So say you had a document that was shredded the standard way, like strips of paper.

Put 'em in a hopper, and have an assembly line with a narrow page scanner scan 'em up and store them on a hard drive.

Then write an app that scans the left & right edges of the paper. Look for a similar pattern of edges(ink) on any other strip. Try to put 'em together and see if it forms words. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sounds like a jigsaw puzzle.

Would that un-shred them?

Das Leben der Anderen

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.

Just like in the cartoons

The evil villain types never seem to learn a good lesson. In the cartoons, the villain captures the hero, tells him an evil secret and discloses all necessary information on how to stop the evil plan once the hero undoubtedly escapes. In the real world, evil villains have people sift through trash and recreate shredded documents and then shred the documents to hide the evidence. In this case, all they really needed to do was have on last book-burning-bonfire for "old times" sake and toss in a few documents as well. Seriously... matches are so much cheaper and more effective than shredders. Heck with that... I'll get one of my henchman to rub some sticks together and save my 79 cents.

The same files in different hands

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?

Stasiland by Anna Funder

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

These old intelligence agencies should have known

...that fire is what you use to destroy documents properly

read stasiland

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.

In Democratic People's Germany, the Shredder ...

dooh forget it ...

The consequences of such

As others have suggested, this can have various political consequences. For those that don't believe so... take a look at what is happening in Poland to communist-era "collaborators" / "spies". Poland is on a witch-hunt.

Government ministers have lost their positions from this, even Warsaw's Archbishop resigned over the matter.

It is likely that these documents will cause similar problems in Germany.

ooooohhhhh, *complicated* algorithms

using complicated computerized algorithms.

But are the computer algorithms also "pretty"?
Are they heavily "optimized"?
Or "lazy heuristic" algorithms?
Maybe they're inauspicious and pink

I've always wondered

why shredding was considered such an effective means of destroying documents. Hey lets cut the paper into equally sized strips, then just toss it into the garbage. Seems quite conceivable any truly interested party could design a device for scanning a mountain of shredded paper. Ever seen how they make hotdogs? Or any other assembly line product. From that point it's only time and electricity before things get sorted out. You have what I would assume is a fairly parallelizable operation that these fancy new multi-core processors could attack pretty well. The algorithms developed for image recognition are getting better and better. I had wondered why the Enron paper-shredding was such an daunting barrier. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to give something like that a shot, if anyone really cared to seek justice in the first place. Shouldn't we hold on to shredded docs in high profile cases, the big corporate and political ones, in case some time in the future we had the tech to tackle this problem. People would probably just start burning things in response to such measures, but burning large quantities of paper is quite a bit more conspicuous an operation. And that above post about crosscutting was brilliant!

Re:After they finished with that job ...

And don't forget the Clinton administration email backup tapes that mysteriously were erased or never created.