Thoughts About the Secret Police

The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. (More here at Wikipedia)

All last evening, and over lunch today, I’ve been reading dozens and dozens of articles on the shitstorm going on with respect to the National Security Agency and their scooping up data about Verizon phone calls and how the NSA has access to major companies (see U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program) to collect our emails, photos, tweets, chat logs and more. Last night and today the aggregator Google News displayed links to over 2,000 articles (and that doesn’t count all of the blog posts) about this ongoing issue. 

But it was a post today that crystallized the FEAR about what’s going on in a way I’d not yet read from anyone or any news outlet.

Your iPhone Works for the Secret Police, from Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth, recapped our fear about what the NSA mass data vacuuming means for all of us. As someone whose ancestry hails from Prussia and Germany — and that I’ve spent alot of time in Germany, especially just a few years after the Berlin Wall fell — I can tell you that the effects of the Stasi repression was still palpable. Allworth points to the Stasi as an example of an intelligence service run amok and what it could lead to:

The infamous East German secret police, the Stasi, managed to infiltrate every part of German life, from factories, to schools, to apartment blocks — the Stasi had eyes and ears everywhere. When East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was reported to have over 90,000 employees and over 170,000 informants. Including the part-time informants, that made for about one in every 63 East Germans collaborating to collect intelligence on their fellow citizens. You can imagine what that must have meant: people had to live with the fact that every time they said something, there was a very real chance that it was being listened to by someone other than for whom they intended. No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi did in East Germany. In large part because of that, those two words — “East Germany” — are indelibly imprinted on the psyche of the West as an example of how important the principles of liberal democracy are in protecting us from such things happening again. And indeed, the idea that it would happen seems anathema to most people in the western world today — almost unthinkable.

President Obama, Congressional leaders and any others are defending the subversion of our Constitution and the 4th amendment as “legal” and “sanctioned”. But when everything is secret, how can we do what President Reagan said about our relationship with the former Soviet Union “Trust…but verify”? The answer is “we can’t” and what’s going on right now in the present-day United States would have been a Stasi leader’s wet dream back then.

If you read nothing else about this important issue, take a few minutes and read Allworth’s article here.