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Thread: The NSA Isn't Like the Stasi

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    Registered User LAGC's Avatar

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    Exclamation The NSA Isn't Like the Stasi

    Interesting article in the latest WIRED magazine -- I don't see it carried online, so I'm just going to quote from it here:

    Ever since Edward Snowden handed thousands of National Security Agency documents over to filmmaker Laura Poitras and writer Glenn Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel room, the NSA's mass surveillance of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic has been widely compared to the abuses of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi.

    The communist republic may have imploded in 1989, but it has nonetheless become synonymous with a smothering, all-knowing spy apparatus.

    It was no coincidence that Poitras chose Leipzig, a city in the heart of the former East Germany, for the recent German debut of her documentary Citizenfour, about Snowden and the NSA. "If the government is doing that kind of surveillance, it has a corrosive effect on democracy and society," Poitras said after the premiere. "People who lived through it can tell you what it was like."

    Indeed. When it was revealed that the NSA had been listening to her phone calls, German chanellor Angela Merkel -- who came of age in communist East Germany, under the Stasi's watchful eye -- told President Obama, "This is just like the Stasi." In an interview last year, NSA whistle-blower and Poitras source William Binney likened the agency to "the Stasi on supersteroids."

    They're wrong. In crucial ways, the two agencies are very different. In its effort to control East Germany, the Stasi made its presence felt in every sphere of life. Its power derived not from the information its surveillance yielded but in the fear and distrust that collection instilled. The NSA, on the other hand, operates best in the dark, its targets unaware of its existence, let alone its dragnet data-gathering. Even Poitras, when asked, acknowledged a line between the two. "The NSA's broad, mass collection is fundamentally different than what the Stasi did," she said in Leipzig.

    Calling the Stasi "secret police" is misleading; it never hid the fact that it was spying. By the late 1980's, more than 260,000 East Germans -- 1.6 percent of all adults in the country -- worked for the organization, either as agents or as informants. (If the NSA employed as many analysts to spy on 320 million Americans, it would have 5 million people on the payroll.) It wanted you to constantly wonder which of your friends was an informant and, ideally, tempt or pressure you into the role of snitch too.
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    On the other hand, what we've learned about the NSA's technological prowess boggles the mind. It has taken the agency just a decade to collect an estimated billion times as much data as the Stasi amassed in nearly half a century -- potentially 5 zettabytes, or 5 billion terabytes. According to one leaked document, by 2006 the NSA was sucking up "one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds." Trillions of domestic call logs, hundreds of billions of cell phone location records, and untold billions of pages of web data give it access to even the most out-of-the-way corners of our increasingly digital lives.
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    It's algorithms and extensive databases make the NSA far more effective than the Stasi ever dreamed of being.

    That's why the comparison is so treacherous. It diminishes the horror of the Stasi's targeted oppression while downplaying the threat posed to our democracy by the NSA's secretive surveillance. The NSA's tactics and techniques may not be anything like the Stasi's -- yet. But it's invisibility, technological expertise, and lack of oversight make it dangerous in a different way.
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    Omnipresent, if not omniscient, the Stasi was one of the most hated institutions in East Germany. In the end it was also one of the first to be swept away when the revolution came and the Berlin Wall fell. Twenty-five years later, Germany is one o fthe most privacy-obsessed countries on earth. There was no role for Stasi tactics in the reunited German democracy. It's up to us to make sure the NSA can never threaten ours."


    I'm reminded of that interview with that former/retired Stasi surveillance agent where he was first told of some of the NSA's spying capabilities, after the Snowden leaks: "My... we could have done great wonders with this!"

    "Great wonders" indeed... the revolution won't be televised, because the revolution won't be happening. Not with government informants and snitches everywhere infiltrating any group critical of the government.

    Although if things ever do get that bad in this country, with dissidents "disappearing" and shit, it will probably be under the umbrella and purview of the DHS, not the NSA directly.

    The camel's nose is under the tent. Keep that in mind as we usher in this New Year.

    Last edited by LAGC; 12-28-2014 at 08:47 AM.
    "That tyranny has all the vices both of democracy and oligarchy is evident. As of oligarchy so of tyranny, the end is wealth; (for by wealth only can the tyrant maintain either his guard or his luxury). Both mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms." -- Aristotle, Book V, 350 B.C.E

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