Resurrecting shredded documents.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends and analysis

The documents you shred today may be reconstructed tomorrow.

In the fall of 1989, during the East German government's final hours, officers of its secret police, the Stasi, frantically threw millions of shredded documents into garbage bags. Now, according to the New York Times, the German government may reconstruct the contents of those 16,000 bags.

Crude ways to reconstruct shredded documents have been around for a while, but the technology has improved greatly. Advanced scanning technology makes it possible to reconstruct documents previously thought unreadable--sometimes even pages that have been ripped into confetti-size pieces. But although a large amount of sensitive data is increasingly stored digitally, recent corporate scandals have proved that shredders are still a critical method of destroying information.

In 1995, the German government commissioned three dozen archivists to reassemble the torn Stasi files one by one. But by 2001, the team had gone through only about 300 bags, so officials began to search for a faster way to piece together the remaining 33 million pages.

Modern image-processing technology has made rebuilding shredded materials easier and taster. Fraunhofer IPK of Berlin, part of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Research Institute, drafted plans to sort, scan, and archive millions of pages of the Stasi files within five years, drawing on expertise in office automation, image processing, biometrics, and handwriting analysis, as well as sophisticated software. The task involves reassembling millions of documents--randomly torn by hand because the flimsy East German shredding machines could not handle the workload--many of which include both handwriting and typed text on the same page. Still...