From: Matthew Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue Nov 18, 2003 10:37:57 AM US/Pacific Subject: Shredded Stasi documents could be assembled in 5 years
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/63/34041.html
The last secrets of the East German State Security Service (Stasi), torn
into shreds and stored in 16,000 brown sacks, may soon be pieced together by
a software program developed by the Fraunhofer Institute.
On Monday, the Institute said it would take five years to solve the world's
biggest jigsaw puzzle electronically. If done by hand, the operation would
take several hundred years.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Stasi agents at the Magdeburg archives
were ordered by their chief Erich Mielke to destroy tens of thousands of
files about (former) Stasi informants and their victims. But the agents were
unable to find the transport needed to take away the shredded documents and
create a huge bonfire.
When East Germans stormed the Stasi buildings, they managed to rescue 16,000
brown paper sacks with shredded documents. Then civil servants, armed with
adhesive tape and endless patience, began to reassemble thousands of files.
The program developed by the Berlin Frauhofer Institute, along with Design
Technology (IPK) and Lufthansa Systems, will speed up this procedure
significantly, by matching the paper fragments and order them correctly.
To do so, all shreds need to be scanned in full colour first. Fortunately,
that's a no-brainer for Lufthansa Systems.
One of the biggest providers of outsourcing solutions for electronic
document processing and archiving in Europe, Lufhthansa processes up to 100
million documents each year.
The major problem with the Stasi fragments, however, is that they are very
small and have no square corners, Gunter Küchler, managing director of
Lufthansa Systems Group GmbH, explained. This means that each shred needs to
be inserted into plastic pockets so that the automatic scanning equipment
can accept them.
It is not clear when the operation will actually begin. On Monday the
Fraunhofer Institute and Lufthansa merely presented a feasibility study. ®
