TOP-SECRET – Stratfor – Re: [OS] GERMANY – computer to reassemble 45 million shredded STASI files

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Aaric S. Eisenstein

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From: os@stratfor.com [mailto:os@stratfor.com]
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 2:38 PM
To: analysts@stratfor.com
Subject: [OS] GERMANY – computer to reassemble 45 million shredded Stasi
files
New Computer Program to Reassemble Shredded Stasi Files
Millions of files consigned to paper shredders in the late days of the
East German regime will be pieced together by computer. The massive job
of reassembling this puzzle from the late Cold War was performed, until
now, by hand.

It’s been years in the making, but finally software designed to
electronically piece together some 45 million shredded documents from
the East German secret police went into service in Berlin on Wednesday.
Now, a puzzle that would take 30 diligent Germans 600 to 800 years to
finish by hand, according to one estimate, might be solved by computer
in seven.

Photo Gallery: Reconstructing the Cold War
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“It’s very exciting to decode Stasi papers,” said Jan Schneider, head
engineer on the project at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production
Systems and Design Technology located in the German capital. “You have
the feeling you are making history.”

Or at least putting it back together again. In 1989, with the looming
collapse of the Communist regime becoming increasingly evident, agents
of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi feverishly plowed
millions of active files through paper shredders, or just tore them up
by hand.

Rights activists interrupted the project and rescued a total of 16,250
garbage bags full of scraps. But rescuing the history on those sheets of
paper amounted to an absurdly difficult jigsaw puzzle. By 2000, no more
than 323 sacks were legible again — reconstructed by a team of 15
people working in Nuremburg — leaving 15,927 to go. So the German
government promised money to any group that could plausibly deal with
the remaining tons of paper.

The Fraunhofer Institute won the contract in 2003, and began a pilot
phase of the project on Wednesday. Four hundred sacks of scraps will be
scanned, front and back, and newly-refined software will try to arrange
the digitized fragments according to shape, texture, ink color,
handwriting style and recognizable official stamps.

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Gu:nter Bormann, from the agency that oversees old Stasi documents (the
Federal Commission for the Records of the national Security Service of
the Former German Democratic Republic), says most of the paper probably
dates from the years 1988 and 1989. “This is what Stasi officers had on
their desks at the end,” he says. “It’s not material from dusty
archives.”

Still-unknown Stasi informants — ordinary East Germans who spied on
other East Germans — stand to be uncovered. International espionage
files are reportedly not among the thousands of sacks; most of those
having been more conclusively destroyed.

The Fraunhofer Institute’s computers will start with documents torn by
hand, because large irregular fragments lend themselves to shape
recognition more readily than uniform strips from shredding machines.
The institute received a promise of EUR6.3 million ($8.53 million) in
April from the German parliament for this phase, which is expected to
take about two years.

If it’s deemed successful, the rest of the job would take four to five
years, according to project chief Bertram Nickolay. The final cost will
be up to EUR30 million.

msm/ap