[silk] "Unshredding" documents
Udhay Shankar N
udhay at pobox.com
Sun Jan 20 04:57:59 PST 2008
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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