8 ms·

Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi

131 points by NeedMoreTea 7y ago

wangchungtonite 7y ago
The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
- lumberjack 7y ago
  Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in making this distinction, though.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    Precisely, when it comes to public companies and government entities, lines can blur and governments do have a track record of introducing laws and regulations to enable access. Another way of thinking about it is - if the NSA wanted coca-cola's or KFC's secret recipe; They would already have it. But social media as a whole, is for governmental security services, the greatest invention they never made.
  - Bluestrike2 7y ago
    That's likely a large party of why the NSA prioritized gaining access to their data through various programs, some of which have been exposed over the years. And when you're talking about nation states, even minor Hail Mary efforts have access to extensive resources sufficient to represent an entirely new sort of threat model to those companies. I doubt anyone at Google was worried about the risk of the NSA digging up their private fiber cables in the middle of nowhere with a backhoe to tap their internal communications prior to revelations about the program.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  My bank knows a huge amount about my finances, addresses, purchase history of almost everything and I'm sure lots else. I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    >I guess what matters is what data holders do with it. If only that was what mattered. What also matters is what they're going to do with it in the future, along with what the people they're going to give it to will do with it, and what the people who steal it will do with it. (Not to mention what they're doing with it right now but not telling you). My personal theory is that because injuries tend to heal eventually and also because they tend to physically hurt, people have a psychological tendency to underestimate the infinite future and also to underestimate anything that doesn't immediately result in physical pain.
- comex 7y ago
  In the US you can send a FOIA request for your FBI file: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/jun/21/foia-how-getting-your-own-fbi-file/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/jun/21/foia-how-...
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Someone said their friend did that and got back a single sheet of paper with the words "An artist of no repute"
    - sonnyblarney 7y ago
      For an artist, this might ironically be the most damning thing they could receive. That would make an excellent title for a book for film: "An Artist Of No Repute".
      - Gibbon1 7y ago
        Not sure about now but used to be 99% of Americans had no FBI file. But if you asked for your file they would have to create one.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Not so much "walk into" as "storm", and not so much "look up" as "dig out of the shred/burn pile". There's a fascinating bit of tech history in the attempts to reconstruct shredded files.
mieseratte 7y ago
If you find this era interesting, I recently read the book "Burning down the Haus"[0]. Most histories I've read of the region and era focus a lot on the mechanics or politics of it, but the book was interesting to me in that it made you aware of the changes, the ebbs and flows of the East German security-state over time as they fought against even harmless "dissidents" and the abuses (and to a lesser extent incentives) to address those. Now I'm not bleeding-heart, but a lot of the tactics really start to look familiar. Modern America isn't that far removed from the Stasi. [0] - https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-german-punks-helped-destroy-the-berlin-wall-722926/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-g...
- jhbadger 7y ago
  If you liked "Burning Down the Haus" you'd probably like Ian Walker's "Zoo Station" which was written actually at the time -- Walker was a British journalist who lived in Berlin for a time and spent time on both sides of the Wall, and was particularly interested in the East German music scene.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 7y ago
  >American journalist and author Tim Mohr admits that when he first arrived in Berlin in 1992, he was clueless to the reality of what the post-Wall city would look like. “I thought all of Germany was Oktoberfest basically,” he told punk writer Legs McNeil at Brooklyn record store Rough Trade last week to celebrate the release of his new book Burning Down the Haus. “I was shocked when I got off the plane and everyone wasn’t wearing lederhosen and holding giant beer steins.” And that person, with that knowledge of global culture, was a journalist? At least in this case, traveling did broadened the mind!
DoreenMichele 7y ago
The bus had stopped under an archway, sheltered from onlookers. Tina and the others asked the driver to open the back door for fresh air. One of them chatted to the driver, while the others let Bernd in through the back. The teenagers stood in the aisle to block the view. Bernd folded his almost 2m frame into the hidden space, and the girls piled their coats on top. This is astonishingly brilliant. Some 20 minutes later, one of their friends picked up the onboard mic and announced: “Our guest today, live in our show: Bernd Bergmann from the GDR!” This is where they went wrong. They should have kept quiet about it after pulling it off, not announced it like they expected everyone to approve of what they had done. They should have tried to sneak him off the bus. At most, they should have talked to their teacher or another adult to find out what they need to do now. They may not have known to take him to a police station so he could formally and officially "enter" the system/country. All their lives they had been told to be brave in the face of injustice. Now they were being treated like criminals. Well, duh. That's why it requires bravery to begin with. If everyone was going to pat you on the head for it, the problem wouldn't exist to begin with.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  If you don't feel like a criminal in today's society, you are complicit.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    My mother actually escaped East Germany in her teens. I have plenty of criticism of what's wrong with the US. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281 But I don't actually agree with your assertion, nor with other comments suggesting that the US is currently about as bad as East Germany was. After she escaped, my mother helped multiple relatives get out. Family stories indicate that part of the process was sending enough cash to help them cover bribes to get their papers. My dad was an American soldier. The exchange rate was 4 West German marks to the dollar and 4 East German marks to the West German marks, or 16 East Marks to the dollar. My father's relative wealth and pragmatic attitude facilitated a lot of this. You didn't have any means to wire it or whatever. You sent cash. Sometimes it got to the intended recipient. Sometimes it didn't. It took tremendous faith, willingness to trust and callouses to keep sending help in the face of that and not just accuse desperate people of lying, etc. My dad was a remarkable man.
Zenst 7y ago
This makes me wonder what the legacy effects of the Stasi today and one gauge of that would be a measure of age demographic uptake of social media for people who grew up under the Stasi and compare that to west german's of the same age demographic. A quick dig into this and: https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm proved a bit insightful, whilst this only has the data for Germany (as a whole as it is again with no East/West) it does show in contrast to other EU members a lower uptake of social media when you factor in internet access. Whilst Poland does show lower, if you scale in internet access you see that Germany per population is a lower uptake. You could also see some impact in previous communist countries, though for many, internet penitration is lower and that plays a factor. Bulgaria shows low usage but in relation to those with internet access - it is pretty high. So hard to see any true correlation. A better set of statistics would enable some true analysis. But on a quick glance, it would seem to of had a legacy impact upon people who grew up in that time who may well have a predisposition towards - not sharing personal information.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  I don't have numbers, but West Germany has string privacy culture. On the one side deriving from Nazi/Gestapo rejection as well as being different from GDR/Stasi. With many political debates. See for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determina...
  - Zenst 7y ago
    Thank you; That ties in so well with my train of thought and feeling from what I was seeing that I can put this one to bed and not spend all night pondering it. Thank you so much for that.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  One of the clearest indicators that correlates with a difference in mindset is to look at Google Streetview. Most places it's fairly uncommon to see a property opted out. In Germany, it's really common to see properties blurred. When it was first rolling out there were articles with pictures of streets where more was blurred than not. Not sure if acceptance has increased much in the years since then, but I'd assume the current young generation may be less bothered.
pmoriarty 7y ago
The most inspiring story along these lines that I know of is that of Sophie Scholl[1], who (along with other members of the White Rose[2]) was beheaded by the Nazis for distributing anti-war leaflets. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose
TheLuddite 7y ago
It's a sad story that the East German Stasi and Communist party thugs avoided any type of punishment for their actions. They should've been arrested, tortured, crippled, blinded and thrown on the streets to beg so the people that suffered their action can spit on them at will.

131 points by NeedMoreTea 7y ago

The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.

lumberjack 7y ago
Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in making this distinction, though.
- Zenst 7y ago
  Precisely, when it comes to public companies and government entities, lines can blur and governments do have a track record of introducing laws and regulations to enable access. Another way of thinking about it is - if the NSA wanted coca-cola's or KFC's secret recipe; They would already have it. But social media as a whole, is for governmental security services, the greatest invention they never made.
- Bluestrike2 7y ago
  That's likely a large party of why the NSA prioritized gaining access to their data through various programs, some of which have been exposed over the years. And when you're talking about nation states, even minor Hail Mary efforts have access to extensive resources sufficient to represent an entirely new sort of threat model to those companies. I doubt anyone at Google was worried about the risk of the NSA digging up their private fiber cables in the middle of nowhere with a backhoe to tap their internal communications prior to revelations about the program.
Waterluvian 7y ago
My bank knows a huge amount about my finances, addresses, purchase history of almost everything and I'm sure lots else. I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >I guess what matters is what data holders do with it. If only that was what mattered. What also matters is what they're going to do with it in the future, along with what the people they're going to give it to will do with it, and what the people who steal it will do with it. (Not to mention what they're doing with it right now but not telling you). My personal theory is that because injuries tend to heal eventually and also because they tend to physically hurt, people have a psychological tendency to underestimate the infinite future and also to underestimate anything that doesn't immediately result in physical pain.
comex 7y ago
In the US you can send a FOIA request for your FBI file: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/jun/21/foia-how-getting-your-own-fbi-file/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/jun/21/foia-how-...
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Someone said their friend did that and got back a single sheet of paper with the words "An artist of no repute"
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    For an artist, this might ironically be the most damning thing they could receive. That would make an excellent title for a book for film: "An Artist Of No Repute".
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      Not sure about now but used to be 99% of Americans had no FBI file. But if you asked for your file they would have to create one.
pjc50 7y ago
Not so much "walk into" as "storm", and not so much "look up" as "dig out of the shred/burn pile". There's a fascinating bit of tech history in the attempts to reconstruct shredded files.

mieseratte 7y ago

If you find this era interesting, I recently read the book "Burning down the Haus"[0]. Most histories I've read of the region and era focus a lot on the mechanics or politics of it, but the book was interesting to me in that it made you aware of the changes, the ebbs and flows of the East German security-state over time as they fought against even harmless "dissidents" and the abuses (and to a lesser extent incentives) to address those. Now I'm not bleeding-heart, but a lot of the tactics really start to look familiar. Modern America isn't that far removed from the Stasi. [0] - https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-german-punks-helped-destroy-the-berlin-wall-722926/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-g...

jhbadger 7y ago
If you liked "Burning Down the Haus" you'd probably like Ian Walker's "Zoo Station" which was written actually at the time -- Walker was a British journalist who lived in Berlin for a time and spent time on both sides of the Wall, and was particularly interested in the East German music scene.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 7y ago
>American journalist and author Tim Mohr admits that when he first arrived in Berlin in 1992, he was clueless to the reality of what the post-Wall city would look like. “I thought all of Germany was Oktoberfest basically,” he told punk writer Legs McNeil at Brooklyn record store Rough Trade last week to celebrate the release of his new book Burning Down the Haus. “I was shocked when I got off the plane and everyone wasn’t wearing lederhosen and holding giant beer steins.” And that person, with that knowledge of global culture, was a journalist? At least in this case, traveling did broadened the mind!

DoreenMichele 7y ago

The bus had stopped under an archway, sheltered from onlookers. Tina and the others asked the driver to open the back door for fresh air. One of them chatted to the driver, while the others let Bernd in through the back. The teenagers stood in the aisle to block the view. Bernd folded his almost 2m frame into the hidden space, and the girls piled their coats on top. This is astonishingly brilliant. Some 20 minutes later, one of their friends picked up the onboard mic and announced: “Our guest today, live in our show: Bernd Bergmann from the GDR!” This is where they went wrong. They should have kept quiet about it after pulling it off, not announced it like they expected everyone to approve of what they had done. They should have tried to sneak him off the bus. At most, they should have talked to their teacher or another adult to find out what they need to do now. They may not have known to take him to a police station so he could formally and officially "enter" the system/country. All their lives they had been told to be brave in the face of injustice. Now they were being treated like criminals. Well, duh. That's why it requires bravery to begin with. If everyone was going to pat you on the head for it, the problem wouldn't exist to begin with.

soulofmischief 7y ago
If you don't feel like a criminal in today's society, you are complicit.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  My mother actually escaped East Germany in her teens. I have plenty of criticism of what's wrong with the US. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281 But I don't actually agree with your assertion, nor with other comments suggesting that the US is currently about as bad as East Germany was. After she escaped, my mother helped multiple relatives get out. Family stories indicate that part of the process was sending enough cash to help them cover bribes to get their papers. My dad was an American soldier. The exchange rate was 4 West German marks to the dollar and 4 East German marks to the West German marks, or 16 East Marks to the dollar. My father's relative wealth and pragmatic attitude facilitated a lot of this. You didn't have any means to wire it or whatever. You sent cash. Sometimes it got to the intended recipient. Sometimes it didn't. It took tremendous faith, willingness to trust and callouses to keep sending help in the face of that and not just accuse desperate people of lying, etc. My dad was a remarkable man.

Zenst 7y ago

This makes me wonder what the legacy effects of the Stasi today and one gauge of that would be a measure of age demographic uptake of social media for people who grew up under the Stasi and compare that to west german's of the same age demographic. A quick dig into this and: https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm proved a bit insightful, whilst this only has the data for Germany (as a whole as it is again with no East/West) it does show in contrast to other EU members a lower uptake of social media when you factor in internet access. Whilst Poland does show lower, if you scale in internet access you see that Germany per population is a lower uptake. You could also see some impact in previous communist countries, though for many, internet penitration is lower and that plays a factor. Bulgaria shows low usage but in relation to those with internet access - it is pretty high. So hard to see any true correlation. A better set of statistics would enable some true analysis. But on a quick glance, it would seem to of had a legacy impact upon people who grew up in that time who may well have a predisposition towards - not sharing personal information.

johannes1234321 7y ago
I don't have numbers, but West Germany has string privacy culture. On the one side deriving from Nazi/Gestapo rejection as well as being different from GDR/Stasi. With many political debates. See for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determina...
- Zenst 7y ago
  Thank you; That ties in so well with my train of thought and feeling from what I was seeing that I can put this one to bed and not spend all night pondering it. Thank you so much for that.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
One of the clearest indicators that correlates with a difference in mindset is to look at Google Streetview. Most places it's fairly uncommon to see a property opted out. In Germany, it's really common to see properties blurred. When it was first rolling out there were articles with pictures of streets where more was blurred than not. Not sure if acceptance has increased much in the years since then, but I'd assume the current young generation may be less bothered.

pmoriarty 7y ago

The most inspiring story along these lines that I know of is that of Sophie Scholl[1], who (along with other members of the White Rose[2]) was beheaded by the Nazis for distributing anti-war leaflets. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose

TheLuddite 7y ago

It's a sad story that the East German Stasi and Communist party thugs avoided any type of punishment for their actions. They should've been arrested, tortured, crippled, blinded and thrown on the streets to beg so the people that suffered their action can spit on them at will.