Nearly two decades after the fall of communism, Europe's former Moscow-dominated states are using the Internet to make public the files of the security services that helped keep their regimes in power.

In the latest step, the body in charge of Poland's communist-era secret police files began Tuesday posting documents related to top officials, including the President Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

The material on the special site of National Remembrance Institute (IPN) - http://katalog.bip.ipn.gov.pl/ - was hardly shocking, and simply confirmed that both Kaczynskis were spied on and harassed by the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB) police because of their anti-communist activities in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the possibility of peeking into the SB archives - which cover people who were spies, victims, or both - was such a draw for Poles that users swamped the IPN's site.

The IPN started posting the files of the Kaczynskis and other officials such as the speakers of the lower and upper houses of parliament, top prosecutors, and the judges of the constitutional tribunal and supreme court, under new legislation that came into force earlier this year.

The Kaczynskis, who came to power in 2005, have made coming to terms with the communist past a major plank of their policy and pushed to vastly increase the number of people affected by come-clean rules from 30,000 to 700,000.

Swathes of the legislation that they piloted were struck down by Poland's constitutional tribunal in May - notably clauses requiring people to file affidavits about their communist-era activities, as well as bringing journalists and academics into the dragnet - but Internet disclosure rules related to high-ranking officials remains in place.

In Bulgaria, a law adopted last December requires the names of all public figures who worked for the secret services before their dissolution in July 1991 to be posted on the Internet.

Earlier this month, the commission in charge of the archives of Bulgaria's Darzhavna Sigurnost posted the names of 141 former and current officials who collaborated with the force, including President Georgy Parvanov.

The Czech Republic pioneered the online - and paper - publication of names, releasing in March 2003 an exhaustive list of tens of thousands of people who worked with former Czechoslovakia's Statni Bezpecnost.

Slovakia followed suit in November 2004.

But using the Internet to guide the public into the archives is not without risks. Numerous historians have underlined that the security service files do not tell the whole story, notably because the secret police often doctored the files, listing people that they had simply bugged as active collaborators.

Collaboration, whether forced or voluntary, was nonetheless massive, and its legacy continues to poison politics across the region.

Accusations of past secret police ties, whether or not they stand up to scrutiny, are an easy way to discredit adversaries.

To avoid some of the effects of mudslinging, as well as some of the failings of its post-World War II moves to root out ex-Nazis, Germany decided to root out collaborators of former East Germany's Stasi after the country was reunited in 1990.

However, it shied away from allowing unfettered access to the archives, whether on paper or online. Any individual can have access to files containing his or her name, and journalists and historians are also allowed to examine them.

While the media has revealed the name of many public figures with Stasi ties, a full list has never been published.

Hungary, meanwhile, has set itself apart by failing to open its archives at all, and former collaborators, including the 2002-2004 prime minister Peter Medgyessy, have not been called to account after their secret police past was nonetheless exposed.