7 ms·

A person I know studied in East Germany in the early 80s via a very limited exchange program. After the wall came down, she requested her Stasi file. It was fa

A person I know studied in East Germany in the early 80s via a very limited exchange program. After the wall came down, she requested her Stasi file. It was fascinating what was in the file - lots of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. For example, she was upset when the Challenger exploded, and this mystified the Stasi informers who had previously identified her as a pacifist (in their minds, the Shuttle was 100% military). Similarly, she was trying to research what happened to a relative who had remained in Germany in the late 30s, and whether she had died of natural causes or been sent to the camps. The Stasi file was filled with speculations on the details of this "sleeper agent" with whom she was trying to establish contact. All this to say that from the mindset of a spy, everything is spy-craft. Everyone's world-view shapes their interpretation of events and reality itself. Was the shuttle a military venture? Partly. Was it also a tool for science? Yup. But the functionaries who looked at her data in the heat of the cold war certainly couldn't see those distinctions. For what it's worth, she was able to get her Stasi file, but has never been able to get a copy of her FBI file.

pvg 5y ago
but has never been able to get a copy of her FBI file This can be confusing because there are various bewildering options, some of which are slower (or outright ineffective for personal records) than others but getting FBI records is comparatively straightforward once you've navigated the maze. I did it a few years ago and they sent me a CD's worth of stuff, plus a note of things they had not sent me or had redacted with instruction on challenging their decisions on these.
- angst_ridden 5y ago
  I'm not positive, but I seem to recall she said that she requested files, but just got back a folder of redacted sheets only showing a few dates and her name scattered throughout.
  - pvg 5y ago
    Most people don't have 'FBI files' or they are essentially trivial stuff. A bunch of mine was immigration stuff.
joebob42 5y ago
Hey, my mother was in almost exactly the same situation and has been talking to people about it. They should get in touch, although I'm not sure how to do that.
- angst_ridden 5y ago
  Did she study in Rostock in '86?
  - joebob42 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm not certain of the year but yeah. Edit: no, she was 88. From brown? Afaiu that was the main program.
    - angst_ridden 5y ago
      Yup, Brown. I'm sure they know one another!
angst_ridden 5y ago
One other funny detail is that most of the Stasi file was handwritten notes in pencil. The vast majority of it was crap. It seems that a lot of her associates were obligated to report on her to the Stasi, but either couldn't or didn't want to give any details that would be harmful to anyone. Much of it was along the lines of "[fellow student] says [subject] was disinclined to denounce rent-control as a counter-revolutionary ploy during a late-night discussion with [other student]." or "[room mate] overheard [subject] calling her family in the US, and did not hear any overt discussion of politics."
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  The Stasi was, especially in the end, exponentional invasive. Meaning they approached allmost anyone in any slightly important position and put pressure on them, to work with them to report on their collegues. (In the end, there were 90 000 of them, with a population of only 16 million). "you help us (and socialism) and we help your career - or you decline and good luck with your career, or the carrer of your partner. Your children ..." The results were mainly those worthless reports. But if you were on the hook once - they could pressure you into more, if they really were interested in your peers and not just routine surveillance of everyone. But could you live with knowing you send one to prison for telling a bad joke about the government? So many still declined, to work with them and suffered the consequences. In either case, the massive surveillance was well known, it was assumed that everything you say loudly - got recorded. Deep chilling effect.
  - pvg 5y ago
    you send one to prison for telling a bad joke about the government? For the most part, that sort of thing did not send people to prison. They'd have run out of prisons.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - emteycz 5y ago
      This is inaccurate. They let it go a lot, but they used it happily the minute you got on their wrong side, and it absolutely was enough.
headcanon 5y ago
I wonder how much of that was just regular Stasi bureaucrats trying to keep their job. If everyone on their watchlist was a potential spy, then maybe their bosses stay scared enough to keep them employed? Or maybe that was the metric they used for promotions, and it inevitably became a target, resulting in a massive inflation of potential "spies" within the bureaucracy.
nicbou 5y ago
This might be a good way to explain my discomfort with online tracking. Machines categorising you based on your behaviour, without your knowledge nor your consent. It's not so bad when it serves you ads (unless it sells alcohol to alcoholics), but there's no telling what similar algorithms would say about you in the hands of a rogue government. They can find vulnerable people, people who hate certain people [0], people who talk to certain people or hold certain ideas. What makes it even more terrifying is that machines can categorise people much faster, based on a much broader set of information. It's not just informants and paper reports, but computers processing and connection millions of data points. I'm bringing all of my data together[1], and the result is a graph of every place I've visited, every conversation I've had, everything I looked up, every book I've read, every transaction I've made, every video I've watched and everyone I've talked to. There's even more data about me in the wild, and if you combined it with other people's data, you could figure out even more about my every move. It's a good thing that the Stasi was a few decades early. [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-haters https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertis... [1] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  I hold that we still have not imagined (not even in science fiction) the horrors totalitarian governments are now capable of in a fully-networked, computer-brokered society.
  - trulyme 5y ago
    Like implementing social credit score and aloowing people activities based on it? Oh wait...
    - emteycz 5y ago
      That's just a very light beginning, a prolog, not more. Imagine Facebook with all its data run by the state, and fully used.
paxys 5y ago
Anyone who is interested in this stuff should watch The Lives of Others (2006). It is unfathomable just how deeply entrenched Stasi was in every affair of citizens in East Germany. No organization in history has perhaps been as effective as them at spycraft, at least of their own people.
- cormacrelf 5y ago
  Their foreign intelligence division (the HVA) was also regarded as the best of the best.

pvg 5y ago

but has never been able to get a copy of her FBI file This can be confusing because there are various bewildering options, some of which are slower (or outright ineffective for personal records) than others but getting FBI records is comparatively straightforward once you've navigated the maze. I did it a few years ago and they sent me a CD's worth of stuff, plus a note of things they had not sent me or had redacted with instruction on challenging their decisions on these.

angst_ridden 5y ago
I'm not positive, but I seem to recall she said that she requested files, but just got back a folder of redacted sheets only showing a few dates and her name scattered throughout.
- pvg 5y ago
  Most people don't have 'FBI files' or they are essentially trivial stuff. A bunch of mine was immigration stuff.

joebob42 5y ago

Hey, my mother was in almost exactly the same situation and has been talking to people about it. They should get in touch, although I'm not sure how to do that.

angst_ridden 5y ago
Did she study in Rostock in '86?
- joebob42 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm not certain of the year but yeah. Edit: no, she was 88. From brown? Afaiu that was the main program.
  - angst_ridden 5y ago
    Yup, Brown. I'm sure they know one another!

angst_ridden 5y ago

One other funny detail is that most of the Stasi file was handwritten notes in pencil. The vast majority of it was crap. It seems that a lot of her associates were obligated to report on her to the Stasi, but either couldn't or didn't want to give any details that would be harmful to anyone. Much of it was along the lines of "[fellow student] says [subject] was disinclined to denounce rent-control as a counter-revolutionary ploy during a late-night discussion with [other student]." or "[room mate] overheard [subject] calling her family in the US, and did not hear any overt discussion of politics."

hutzlibu 5y ago
The Stasi was, especially in the end, exponentional invasive. Meaning they approached allmost anyone in any slightly important position and put pressure on them, to work with them to report on their collegues. (In the end, there were 90 000 of them, with a population of only 16 million). "you help us (and socialism) and we help your career - or you decline and good luck with your career, or the carrer of your partner. Your children ..." The results were mainly those worthless reports. But if you were on the hook once - they could pressure you into more, if they really were interested in your peers and not just routine surveillance of everyone. But could you live with knowing you send one to prison for telling a bad joke about the government? So many still declined, to work with them and suffered the consequences. In either case, the massive surveillance was well known, it was assumed that everything you say loudly - got recorded. Deep chilling effect.
- pvg 5y ago
  you send one to prison for telling a bad joke about the government? For the most part, that sort of thing did not send people to prison. They'd have run out of prisons.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - emteycz 5y ago
    This is inaccurate. They let it go a lot, but they used it happily the minute you got on their wrong side, and it absolutely was enough.

headcanon 5y ago

I wonder how much of that was just regular Stasi bureaucrats trying to keep their job. If everyone on their watchlist was a potential spy, then maybe their bosses stay scared enough to keep them employed? Or maybe that was the metric they used for promotions, and it inevitably became a target, resulting in a massive inflation of potential "spies" within the bureaucracy.

nicbou 5y ago

This might be a good way to explain my discomfort with online tracking. Machines categorising you based on your behaviour, without your knowledge nor your consent. It's not so bad when it serves you ads (unless it sells alcohol to alcoholics), but there's no telling what similar algorithms would say about you in the hands of a rogue government. They can find vulnerable people, people who hate certain people [0], people who talk to certain people or hold certain ideas. What makes it even more terrifying is that machines can categorise people much faster, based on a much broader set of information. It's not just informants and paper reports, but computers processing and connection millions of data points. I'm bringing all of my data together[1], and the result is a graph of every place I've visited, every conversation I've had, everything I looked up, every book I've read, every transaction I've made, every video I've watched and everyone I've talked to. There's even more data about me in the wild, and if you combined it with other people's data, you could figure out even more about my every move. It's a good thing that the Stasi was a few decades early. [0] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertisers-to-reach-jew-haters https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enabled-advertis... [1] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

TimTheTinker 5y ago
I hold that we still have not imagined (not even in science fiction) the horrors totalitarian governments are now capable of in a fully-networked, computer-brokered society.
- trulyme 5y ago
  Like implementing social credit score and aloowing people activities based on it? Oh wait...
  - emteycz 5y ago
    That's just a very light beginning, a prolog, not more. Imagine Facebook with all its data run by the state, and fully used.

paxys 5y ago

Anyone who is interested in this stuff should watch The Lives of Others (2006). It is unfathomable just how deeply entrenched Stasi was in every affair of citizens in East Germany. No organization in history has perhaps been as effective as them at spycraft, at least of their own people.

cormacrelf 5y ago
Their foreign intelligence division (the HVA) was also regarded as the best of the best.