"Piecing together the secrets of the Stasi".
"In the weeks before the Wall fell, Stasi agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks."
"There were reports on television about a small team manually reconstructing the files. So I thought, This is a very interesting field for machine vision." "At the time, Bertram Nickolay, a Berlin-based engineer and expert in machine vision, was a lead engineer at a member institute of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the German technology giant that helped invent the MP3. With the right scanner and software, he reckoned, a computer could identify the fragments of a page and piece them together digitally."
"The reality proved more frustrating."
Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi | The New Yorker
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