Shreddered Stasi Documents Reconstructed

In the November 1989, the agents of the east german secret police Stasi, had a problem: On the streets there was revolution that would soon take over the government and in the archives there was a precise documentation of what they did in the last 40 years. So, they hurriedly shreddered as much documents as they could.

In the years to follow, people hat to accept the fast that it was just not feasible to reconstruct these documents.

One engineer of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft didn't accept that and developed a program that can reconstruct shreddered documents. The trick is to categorize the shreds before making an attempt to match them. Otherwise, the number of possible combination would grow exponentially with the number of shreds.

The security lesson? Shredding documents no longer keeps them secret.