3 ms·
> [western world citizens] are today under more intense surveillance than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of [...] I keep hearing that, and I'm sorry, but it
by Nitramp 15y ago
> [western world citizens] are today under more intense surveillance than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of [...]
I keep hearing that, and I'm sorry, but it's pure sensationalist bullshit.
At the end, the Stasi employed one secret informer per ~90 citizens (!), and one official employee per ~180 citizens. That was the (proportionally) biggest secret service that ever existed. The Stasi kept tabs on more or less anything happening in the Eastern German society, down to what individual people had for lunch, and had infiltrated every organisation within its reach.
I can understand disagreement with things like this Bundestrojaner. But spouting ridiculous, sensationalist comparisons like these only harms a legitimate issue by painting its adherents as raving zealots.
- 0x12 15y agoI think part of this is because nowadays it requires far fewer people to keep track of the population than it did back then. Just mining Facebook and twitter will tell you what lots of people had for lunch...
- fl3tch 15y agoAdvertising companies know everything you do online. They have "behavioral profiles" far more detailed than anything the Stasi had. We are in fact under much more surveillance, but the problem is not the government.
- msy 15y agoOh please, the advertising profiles I've seen are only a half-notch above pure entropy. They're about as accurate as the kind of rubbish you see from sentiment analysis on tweets.
- omellet 15y agoI think there's a large difference between political and business surveillance. The Stasi were used to monitor and control political thought, whereas Facebook just wants to make money off of me. What scares me is that a malevolent government could use their privately collected information in service of political suppression; they already do it for law enforcement and military purposes.