[silk] "Unshredding" documents

[Udhay Shankar N]

Very cool, and very thought-provoking. Shades of 
both Brin's Transparent Society, and the librarian from _Snow Crash_ in here.

Just like digital data is only considered safely 
erased when the substrate (e.g, a hard disk) is 
irrecoverably destroyed, so too, here.

Anybody recall the last line from _The Dead Past_? ;-)

Udhay

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/295655

Reassembling a puzzle with 600 million pieces

Husband spying on wife among secrets revealed by 
`unshredder' chewing through East German secret-police files
Jan 20, 2008 04:30 AM
Brett Popplewell
Staff Reporter

Nineteen years ago, as the Berlin Wall crumbled 
and democracy swept through communist East 
Germany, STASI agents  members of the secret 
police  worked feverishly to destroy millions of 
top-secret documents in an effort to keep them from Western eyes.

Attempting to shred some 45 million items as 
quickly as possible, the agents fed page after 
page into shredding machines. The equipment 
quickly jammed, leaving the agents to tear up the 
materials by hand and throw them into garbage bags meant to be incinerated.

But with East Germany quickly falling into the 
hands of the west, the agents were stopped before 
they could burn the shreds. Some 600 million 
pieces in 16,000 bags became the property of the 
current German government. They have remained, 
for the most part, in that state.

Then, in May 2007, the German government revealed 
the world's most sophisticated 
pattern-recognition machine, the $8.5 million 
dollar (U.S.) E-Puzzler, which can digitally put 
back together even the most finely shredded papers.

Developed in Berlin by the Fraunhofer Institute 
of Production Facilities and Construction 
Technology, the E-puzzler is a computerized 
conveyor belt that runs shards of shredded and 
torn paper through a digital scanner.

Scanning up to 10,000 shreds at once, the machine 
links them together by their colour, typeface, 
outline, shape and texture  not unlike how the 
average human might try to piece together a 
puzzle. The machine then displays a digital image 
of the original document on a computer screen.

"The task to automatically reconstruct 16,250 
bags full of torn documents using a technical 
system . . . presents an enormous technological 
challenge," says Bertram Nickolay, the lead inventor of the machine.

During the Cold War, East Germany's Ministry for 
State Security  STASI  was regarded as one of 
the most formidable secret police forces of its 
day. Using a vast network of civilian informants, 
the STASI kept files on up to 6 million of East 
Germany's 16 million citizens through an 
estimated 400,000 informants from all walks of life.

For decades, neighbours spied on neighbours, 
priests spied on their flocks, husbands spied on 
their wives and even children spied on their 
parents. They reported their discoveries to the 
90,000 STASI agents keeping tabs on the population.

Prior to the creation of the E-puzzler, a team of 
15 Germans had laboriously been putting the 
pieces together by hand. But they managed to 
rebuild only 10,000 documents from 300 bags 
during 12 years. The German government estimated 
it would take a further 600 to 800 years to finish the job.

But having uncovered heartbreaking stories of 
espionage  like that of Vera Lengsfeld, a 
54-year old German politician who was shocked to 
learn she had been spied on by her husband for 11 
years  the German public demanded the files be 
put together more quickly. An estimated 3.4 
million Germans have officially requested to see 
the information the STASI gathered on them.

With the E-puzzler, Nickolay says the government 
will be able to un-shred the remaining documents by 2013.

Nickolay acknowledges his machine's importance in 
helping millions of Germans to piece together 
their former lives. But says his machine is even 
more significant to the rest of the world.

In addition to piecing together shreds of paper, 
the machine has been used by Chinese 
archaeologists to reconstruct smashed Terracotta 
warriors found in the tomb of Emperor Qin. And 
the equipment has deciphered barely-legible lists 
of Nazi concentration camp victims.

There is only one E-puzzler in operation, but 
Nickolay's team has received interest from other 
former Eastern Bloc countries looking for a way 
to get at their own state secrets of the past.

"It's no longer safe to shred a document," 
Nickolay says. "The only safe way to destroy something is by burning it."


-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


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