Unbelievable. Wired has a story about using mesh computing to piece together hundreds of tons of shredded files left behind by the East German secret police, the Stasi. After gaining access to her 60-volume [!] file, one former peace activist tracked down and confronted the agent who managed her case:
Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. "If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me," she says. "It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes."Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police [wired via boingboing]