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> That is quite literally Stasi. Not vaguely like, exactly like. Come on. I agree this is ridiculous and unacceptable, but this kind of hyperbole only serves t
by johncolanduoni 11y ago
> That is quite literally Stasi. Not vaguely like, exactly like.
Come on. I agree this is ridiculous and unacceptable, but this kind of hyperbole only serves to make people discount the sentiment. The NSA has not tried to use this to suppress political dissidence. The Stasi themselves called the way they manipulated prisoners "decomposition", and all evidence suggests it deserved the name. It makes the CIA torture look like juvenile detention.
Is that a possible dark future if this goes unchecked? For sure. But I think one of the main reasons serious anti-NSA sentiment and action has had trouble making it to the mainstream is that people say things like this that make most people write the movement off as a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theorists. I don't think you are one, so please don't talk like one.
- ck2 11y agoI mean the data warehousing part of the stasi. Didn't mean to imply the entire government is 100% stasi, I mean their data warehousing obsession about their own citizens is exactly stasi-like.
- laotzu 11y ago>The NSA has not tried to use this to suppress political dissidence. False. They did with Martin Luther King Jr. To quote the Senator Church of the Church Committee which investigated this: >In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. >If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. >I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.