For more than a decade, a German organization known as the Gauck authority has been laboring to reconstruct hundreds of millions of document fragments shredded or hand-torn by the East German police before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It hasn’t gotten very far.
Jan Schneider of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute demonstrates Fraunhofer’s software to reconstruct Stasi files. (AP photo)
Now the government has agreed to fund a high-tech project which its backers claim could stitch together the pages in just a few years — or one-hundredth the time it would take at the present pace of reconstruction. That is welcome news for journalists, citizens and others eager to peek into the files (several million applications to view the files have been entered), and perhaps bad news for those who would rather see the Stasi’s surveillance of often-private matters remain hidden.
The numbers in this project are staggering. There are an estimated 45 million documents, reduced to 600 million scraps of paper, in more than 16,000 brown paper sacks. The Guardian reports: “Until now the painstaking reconstruction had been carried out by 30 workers near Nuremberg. Spreading the scraps on large trestle tables and with the use of adhesive tape, tweezers and magnifying glasses, they managed to stick together 350 sackfuls since 1991. But with more than 16,000 brown sacks still to go, it was estimated that they would need another 400 to 800 years to complete the task by hand.”
The math works like this: It has taken 16 years so far, meaning under 22 sacks a year have been restored. (The pace has held fairly steady of late, suggesting the process isn’t getting any faster. Just 100 sacks have been restored in the past four years.) Project that rate forward and you get a period of over 730 years, or to be safe, a range between 400 and 800 years. And from the Guardian’s description of the work — involving magnifying glasses, tweezers, and adhesive tape — it’s no wonder.
Software meant to replace these tools was first announced by Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute for Design Technology four years ago. The plan was to scan the documents, then let computer algorithms recreate them, using shape, color, texture and handwriting (and, for hand-torn documents, the contours of the scraps, like in a puzzle). But the government balked at the price tag: up to $70 million for a process projected to take five years. And so for four years, the turtle pace continued, seemingly guaranteeing that the vast majority of people in the files would never live to see them.
This week, Germany approved a cheaper, pilot project. Fraunhofer scientists predict their E-Puzzler, which has been used for tax-evasion inquiries, will go through 400 sacks in two years, at a cost of $8.5 million. At that rate, it would still take almost 80 more years. But if that project is successful, the pace will be quickened so that all documents can be recreated by 2013. Paper-shredding companies are no doubt anxious about the results.
Further reading: Fraunhofer explains the technology in its press announcement, though the English translations are a bit rough. Among the 198 comments about this story on the tech site Slashdot: “scanning 16,000 sacks of shredded paper… should take a few hundred years. after that, the computer will be able to reassemble all of the documents in 30 seconds. Whew!”