Shredded Secret Police Files Being Reassembled 222
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh-oh (Score:5, Interesting)
Intense political pressure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intense political pressure? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This makes sense to me- I'm guessing (i.e. I could be completely wrong) that the 10% are the "true believers" in the communist ideology, while the other 90% were going along with the party since that was their only chance to get into power.
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The guys they kept tabs on? ;-) (Score:3, Insightful)
Paul B.
Stasi files (Score:5, Interesting)
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].
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Listen to harmonica. This movie, The Lives of Others, is a terrific movie, and a strong cautionary about what happens to people who live in surveillance societies.
I think about the subtle way that my driving has changed ever since I got a traffic ticket in the mail for something I don't have any memory of having done. A camera must have seen be run a yellow-turning-red, I guess, which trigg
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This is one I bring up when people pull out the "if you're not doing anything wrong, why would you care if you're being monitored?" card.
I compare it to the feeling I get when I'm driving and a cop pulls out behind me.
Immediately I start thinking "Are my headlights working properly? Am I going the speed limit? Did I come to a complete st
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I find it interesting in that case that Kohl at that time was involved in a big fund raising scandal [wikipedia.org]. As of today, he refused to name the donators of the money
I a
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The Stasi files weren't updated after the GDR collapsed in 1989, while the "scandal money" donated to the CDU was given to it in the 1990s. Unless there are some additional links, I don't see the connection.
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The old East German SED, became the PDS after re-unification
Not quite - the PDS emerged out of the SED after most of the SED's hard core leaders were thrown out or went by themselves. And yes, the PDS/WASG did gain seats last election - but apart from an early statutory phrase there's not a whiff of communism left in it. They've actually decided to declare commitment to private enterprise and market economy, and politically their positions are more like what the then moderately left-wing Social Democrats, one of Germany's two big mainstream parties, used to represe
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Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:5, Funny)
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~Pev
Re:Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Jigsaw Puzzle (Score:4, Funny)
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As long as you use PORN it should work. (Score:2)
As long as Frauenhoffer give those people PORN in reward, previous litterature evidence [boingboing.net] shows that it would work very well.
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Trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
And they will just re-shred the private, personal stuff, correct?
Re:Trust? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Trust? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trust? (Score:4, Insightful)
We are talking about East Germany, not Nazi Germany. There could be dirt on people in their twenties in those files.
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"Today, little Horst pooped in his pants, and didn't tell anybody."
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(BTW, reunification occurred in 1990).
Researcher 1: We've put together the first document! ...urging a more Western approach towards toilet training?
Researcher 2: Hmm, it's about some kid named Hans, age 4.
Researcher 1: Wow, Hans ran an underground printing press urging... what does this say?
Researcher 2:
Researcher 1: And he demanded access to Barney.
Researcher 2: That would send anyo
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*cancels meeting with attorney about Last Will and Testament*
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Actually that data is only accessible by the office (called Birthler Behörde in German after its head, because the official name "Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik" is a bit long) who only grants access to the people, who were spied upon to find out, what was known and who did it. Journalists and researchers can request access and there is a process in place where the victim can deny the request.
There is an addition
Re:Trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trust? (Score:4, Interesting)
So yes, I agree, evil / trust is a merely question of perspective.
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Re:Trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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"Economic migration" does sound a lot more reasonable than "fleeing in terror" -- but it's still flight, it still indicates fear, and the people were still walled in.
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2. We're not stopping people from leaving the United States.
3. If you did LSD in the 1960s, the 2000s are the ultimate bad trip!
Re:Trust? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't recall there being much media coverage after that, it just sort of went away.
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Exactly, there's No Such Agency.
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People aren't too concerned about the privacy aspects of the German government retaining the STASI files. They are no longer being maintained and, more importantly, no longer being acted upon. If you can't find a job in unified Germany it is because of economics, not because of your friend/neighbour/teacher's mutterings
Human efforts? (Score:5, Funny)
They'll have it assembled before you can say "Matlock"!
- RG>
shredding is so last week.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Iranian Revolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Iranian Revolution (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean http://www.thememoryhole.org/ [thememoryhole.org]
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
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Look out, the Shredded Secret Police were out to get you!
Why do this, you ask? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm... (Score:2)
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?
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Piecing these together is going to make a lot of people very nervous - as indeed it should.
scanning 16,000 sacks of shredded paper... (Score:2, Funny)
Unscramble an Egg (Score:2)
Shredding not safe anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
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if you really want paper destroyed your best options are probablly burning and pulping.
another thing you can do is spread the shredded material out, if some goes in your bin at home, some in the local tip and some in your bin at the office then its going to be much harder for one person to get all the
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You _could_ even try to reassemble them by hand, but the sheer mass makes that prohibitive, time-wise.
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For a more environmentally benign method of destruction, pulp it, and if you have no use for low grade ink contaminated paper pulp, you can always put it out in the recycling with your newspapers.
These papers were mostly strip shredded (Score:2)
Also, mix your bin around. Add multiple papers, and take out others so all the pieces are not in the same place or thrown out at the same time. The chances a thief can economically put together those shreds from a vast assortment drops to almost nil when it's not guaranteed the entire paper is even there.
Unless you are Bill Gates, you are not interesting enough to waste time on. The thief will move on
Re:Shredding not safe anymore? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Shredding not safe anymore? (Score:4, Funny)
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...
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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
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Unless you use a crosscut shredder all you are doing is raising the bar from casual snooping to requiring some dedication.
New from Staples... (Score:2)
Iran Tackled the Same Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Rainbow's End (Score:3, Informative)
Seemed a little far-fetched to me, even for Vinge.
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Finally... (Score:2)
jigsaw puzzle? (Score:2)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The same files in different hands (Score:3, Insightful)
Stasiland by Anna Funder (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
You don't know those Germans. (Score:2)
read stasiland (Score:4, Informative)
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 ... (Score:2)
ooooohhhhh, *complicated* algorithms (Score:3, Insightful)
But are the computer algorithms also "pretty"?
Are they heavily "optimized"?
Or "lazy heuristic" algorithms?
Maybe they're inauspicious and pink
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Just because they made a DRM-free format doesn't make them enablers of music piracy. There are many other DRM-free audio formats. It's not up to file-format makers to police the world. They made a format that works well, and it became popular because of it.
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Old Stuff... (Score:2)
They had a shredder in the basement that was twenty years old, but still more sophisticated:
It first crosscut the paper, and after that there was a stage that was connected with the water-tap. It wet the pieces and mixed them down.
The end result was some plaster-like grey pile in a bucket.
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Mind, these days the "secret" underground base where I did that is now a tourist attraction (the "Diefenbunker", near Carp north of Ottawa).
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Please tell me more about yourself, so we can have some details before your peculiar species is finally extinct. But hey, Dick, is that you?
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But then I started thinking about it. This would not be a good distributed project. There are some things that might be better off not in the hands of joe and jane q public. Most of the Stasi stuff info was useless but there could be real information in there which 18 years later. Slim chance but still a chance.
Puzzle people (Score:2)
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1) They want to nab 'really bad people'. If they can't press any charges, you certainly might consider throwing people who had committed atrocities under the Soviet regime out of power.
2) There is a limited amount of history rewriting going on in East Germany with former communist party folks saying that it wasn't "that bad". Common sense would dictate having to build walls and minefields around your nation to keep people IN would suggest that it was indeed "that bad"...