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Old Cold War Jigsaw

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I wrote this

Shredded documents.

They look like a mess but most crackers spies did jigsaws as a kid.

Crackers spies start by sorting by color, thickness of paper and other possible clues, then isolate chunks bit by bit and work on them. It takes a while, but once finished they can tape them together and retrieve the information quite easily.

In general, if a document is sensitive enough to shred, then it should also be worth disposing of by a security company specialising in destruction of company paperwork.

Now the idea has come back to haunt certain people - as new software technology promises to reconstruct shredded documents

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.

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.


It will be interesting to see how many facts about the Cold War will be revealed by this - if it works of course ...

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