Excerpt:

Historian Kristie Macrakis of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who has spent more than a decade studying Stasi databases — including the one used in the current study — agrees. “I was really excited that someone crunched these numbers,” she says. “They basically quantified what I did [already] in a qualitative way.” Macrakis, who has argued that East German industrial espionage was ultimately a failure, says the next step is to look at how the stolen technology was integrated into individual East German firms, who often requested — and received — the stolen information.

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