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Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs
- ihsw 13y agoIt's interesting that the only defense the USG can muster in this debacle is their insistence that there are policies in place to prevent abuse. Policies change when governments change, so every time there are US senate elections[1] or US presidential elections[2] then it'll be a chance that we irrevocably move further down the dark road of totalitarianism. If there's anything to do to remedy this situation, it's talk to your congressional representative. Gerrymandering may have made that a pointless task, but it's just the first step towards freedom. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
- gorbachev 13y agoThe "we have policies" defense is complete horse manure for the reason you stated and also because if those policies are secret, as is the case with regards to wholesale surveillance state policies, there is no way to verify they're being followed or hold anyone accountable for violating those policies. Additionally even when governments don't change the policies have an uncanny habit of not being followed whenever it's convenient to ignore them. That has happened time and time again.
- shill 13y ago"In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive..."
- ewrwerwerw 13y agoMy father, a man of 75 years old in the last couple of months had been mentioning that all our calls were being recorded. I dismissed him as just paranoid. After all, I'm the software developer, I'm the techie in our house. I know best, I would tell myself. Now I feel quite stupid. How could I have been so naive in believing that our government would never do this. This is the land of the free after all right? I've learned to never trust our government. At least that is a good thing that came out of this. edit: The funny thing is that right now he is having a small problem with somebody because they had a verbal agreement over the phone about how much a repair would cost. Both their memories seem to remember different things. It is only a couple hundred dollars but my father said that if were in the order of $50,000 or more he would get a lawyer so that the conversation he had with the man could be retrieved to prove my father was right. I told him that that would never happen because, mmm..., because the government would not want to give it to anybody else. At that point I remembered that I had already been wrong once so I could easily be wrong again.
- ferdo 13y ago> I dismissed him as just paranoid. ALWAYS listen to the crazy old guy, especially if he's been correct about past events. You don't have to believe him, but at least listen to him. regards, A Crazy Old Guy
- alan_cx 13y agoMost of all, because one day, if we are lucky, we will be that crazy old guy.
- vacri 13y agoOne of the best things you could do as a country is stop with the 'land of the free' parareligion. You're not particularly freer than your contemporaries. In some things you are, in others you're not. You have a great level of freedom, but due to the parareligion, there is a sentiment (obviously not shared by all) that other countries must somehow 'not be free'. It creates a distorted sense of self.
- cliffu 13y agoUSA is demonstrably less free than anywhere else if you define free merely as "not being in prison".
- griffordson 13y agoA choice quote: Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said. “It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 13y agoHe meant naivete, children who understand not the storied darkness of the toys they play with.
- ferdo 13y agoNot surprising. DHS hired an old Stasi hand and an old KGB hand as advisors under Dubya: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Whitney0121.htm http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Whitney0121.htm
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hiddenfeatures 13y agoIn my experience over the last few weeks, younger Germans (my age, 30 years & younger) are blissfully ignorant ("I don't have anything to hide" - sounds familiar ?) to the impact of the government spying on its citizen. 24 years are a long time & that part of history is not as well-ingrained in the collective memory as the Holocaust. :-(
- walshemj 13y agoIts always struck me as odd that Germans seem to be so hot on privacy but seem fine with having mandatory ID cards and with the police being able to demand you show it.
- philipp-de 13y agogermans generally like order very, very much. :)
- agilebyte 13y agoComing from another country that has mandatory ID cards it does not seem odd to me. How do you confirm someone's identity otherwise? Maybe you are thinking that criminals can always have fake IDs so having an ID is pointless?
- jlgreco 13y agoThe idea that you could be required to identify yourself is probably what seems strange to them. In (at least) several US states the police can require you to identify yourself, but telling them your name is all that is required. Americans have an aversion to "papers please", because for decades that is one of the things that we felt distinguished ourselves from certain other countries.
- walshemj 13y agoQuite that is why the UK drooped ID cards after WW2 rather surprised that other countries which had much more bad experience with "papers please" in WW2 did not do the same.
- ChrisAntaki 13y agoAssuming this level of unconstitutional surveillance continues, what can we do? Here are some of my ideas: Send encrypted emails, to communicate long distances. Use the internet way less. Use cell phones only to arrange real life meetups. Hang out & talk to people in real life. Never have a meaningful discussion "over the air".
- jlgreco 13y agoPGP/GPG adoption needs to go way up, but I am concerned by the rise of "non-owned" devices. I would put way less trust in running PGP/GPG from a client-side mail client on a smartphone with OTA updates, apparent carrier spyware, etc than I would in PGP/GPG running on OSX, for instance. Maybe one way to partially mitigate these concerns is to push for only storing/using private keys on these devices on a TPM.
- alan_cx 13y agoIn general, I am using the internet and electronic communications less and lees. Often I am now asking myself if what I am going to do is necessary or does it have to be electronic. As well as altering my choice to use, I am adding more and more security options. Mainly silly small things like the add-on that chooses HTTPS, ad blockers, or using Iron in stead of chrome, and so on. So, where I have an easy or ultimately seamless choice, Im choosing to encrypt and block. Nothing major, I know I am not secure, but more of my traffic is encrypted. Lastly, while I have used Linux servers for years, Im now trying to make Linux work for me as a Windows replacement. Partly because of the awful Windows 8 which I will down grade to from Vista (!!!), but more so because of these security issues. So, nothing big, but a general move. But one key thing is that is people are anything like me, what we will see is more and more internet traffic become encrypted. Not sure what that with do to spy paranoia. Probably makes us default guilty. The other plan is to use NO defenses what so ever. Open one's self up, but never ever do anything other then the tedious benign on the internet. Show the world how open and nonthreatening you are. Keep all the evil stuff like joint smoking, porn watching, political opinion, medical questions, employment details, etc off the electronic spy.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoIn general, plaintext protocols of any form should be met with the same derision as something like telnet would today. Encrypt all the things. We need the very idea of sending something like plain ASCII beyond your computer to be offensive at its core. Considering passwords are often stored in plaintext and companies think this is no big deal, I'm not sure how well that will work. Without proper trust models in place, this won't solve all the problems, but I feel like that's what the culture of communication on the Internet has to look like. It has to be done by the engineers at the protocol level, and application developers have to adopt it. Servers and other peer-to-peer clients should refuse to speak plaintext. Focusing on things like getting people to use PGP, OTR, etc, is hopeless and will only work with other privacy geeks.
- TheCraiggers 13y agoGood! I'm glad some people still remember history. Sadly, it looks like we're going to be doomed to repeat it rather we remember it or not.
- feral 13y agoThe EU, which Germany is a major part of, passed the Data Retention Directive [0] in 2006. That directive required every state in the EU to pass laws that all their citizens telecommunications metadata would be stored for at least 6 months, and often more, up to 2 years. As I understand it, this means all 'metadata' is required to be stored, including the source and destination for every phonecall and text message, including cell location for cellphones, and information mapping IPs to users for web+email (and perhaps also the source and destination of every e-mail; but I'm not certain about that?). I believe that the data is stored by service providers, and only passed to law enforcement in the context of a particular investigation in theory (in the Irish implementation, a court order is not required to access an individual's records; a request from a high ranking law enforcement officer or tax official is enough). But its all collected and stored. Maybe that's a sufficiently big difference that warrants the EU retention laws not being mentioned in this article? But it seems to me that they should still be part of this narrative. There have been challenges to the EU directive, and countries dragging their heels about implementing it. But, by and large, it is an established part of EU law. I don't know a lot about this area, but I feel that an understanding of existing European data retention laws seems to be missing from the coverage of the European reaction to the US data collection issues. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
- lispm 13y agoThe German 'Verfassungsgericht' has said in 2010 that it is unconstitutional.
- blumentopf 13y agoIn Germany, the data retention law was ruled unconstitutional by the German Constitutional Court on March 2, 2010. Data retention was allowed in general by the court, but only with significant restrictions. The German government failed to pass a new law which fulfills both the EU data retention directive and the court's restrictions. The EU Commission therefore is currently sueing Germany to implement the EU data retention directive. If the EU Commission prevails, Germany will have to pay 315.036,54 Euro per day as a penalty fee until a proper law is enacted.
- coldtea 13y ago"Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs" Might as well have written: "Memories of segregation and lynching color African American's view of modern day bigots". I mean the "color" part tries to make it as something strange (or even bad, some kind of "distortion") is happening, when it's the most natural thing in the world: actual historical experience with the issue, makes German's more informed on what it can result to and more sensitive to how bad it is. I'm always amazed to what BS spin columnists put on their stories. And not always innocently.
- grannyg00se 13y agoBut this guy was a colonel in the Stasi. If a similar interview with someone who did participate in lynchings were conducted, I don't think your second title would be all that far off. But racial bigotry isn't the hot issue right now. I think it's helpful to draw parallels to the past - and a title like that might help encourage people to actually read.
- jlgreco 13y ago> But racial bigotry isn't the hot issue right now. It seems to be in a limited extent, though not for news items that are relevant on HN.
- lispm 13y agoThe US is in need for a full operating system upgrade. Like going from Mac OS 9 to OS X. Not a .1 upgrade. Obama delivered a Microsoft-style upgrade. You were promised 'hope' and 'change'. What you got is a worse version of Microsoft Windows with lots of spyware and a built-in 'security' system.
- dwaltrip 13y agoWe need to re-write the damn kernel
- Kototama 13y agoLet's call it HURD!
- yk 13y agoAll the government agencies will run as seperate enterprieses in userland, with clearly defined responsibilities and strong seperation of powers. Until the new constitution is done, the government will just run as a single cohesive unit, ignoring the entire history of political science.
- D9u 13y agoNot really. The US Constitution is fine. What we need is compliance on the part of the government.
- lispm 13y agoIt's broken. You need a rewrite.
- ajross 13y agoRight. Also a federal guarantee of accessible health coverage, the end to two wars (and the notable lack of any new ones), two supreme court justices with quite acceptable records on civil liberties, and currently a reasonable shot at bringing federal immigration law into line with the size of the actual immigrant workforce. I wasn't able to fit all that into your OS metaphor, sorry. Less rhetoric, more policy debate please.
- junto 13y agoThis story always disturbed me about the Stasi: http://theresagameinthat.blogspot.de/2011/06/stasi-scent-library.html http://theresagameinthat.blogspot.de/2011/06/stasi-scent-lib...
- andrewcooke 13y agolove the framing in the title. knowledge of death and disease colours doctors' views on healthy living
- sentenza 13y agoWhat I find suspiciously absent from the relevations so far is the DNA angle. If the STASI had had todays technology, they would have tapped all phones, stored all data, and collected DNA samples wherever they can. Assuming that all spy agencies think more or less alike on the issue of data gathering, why haven't we heard of the NSA collecting DNA samples?
- pstuart 13y agoNot that it could go wrong there.... http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/How-innocent-man-s-DNA-was-found-at-killing-scene-4624971.php http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/How-innocent-man-s-DNA-w...
- Asparagirl 13y agoThe US government's acquisition of people's biometric information, including DNA, has already been outed by WikiLeaks in their release of the Embassy cables a few years ago. Did you see this story? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202678 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/... The text of the original cable: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202678 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/...
- nekojima 13y ago"The Lives of Others" (Das Leben der Anderen) is an excellent German film that dramatically shows the intrusiveness of the Stasi (secret police) into daily life in the former East Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others In the film you can see some of the techniques used by Wolfgang Schmidt and his colleagues.
- Historiopode 13y agoIronically enough, the lead actor (Ulrich Mühe[1]) had really been under Stasi surveillance; a surveillance to which his then wife allegedly collaborated. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_M%C3%BChe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_M%C3%BChe
- VladRussian2 13y agothis is the most destructive aspect of surveilance state - it is not that the state, ie. its proper officers and facilities, are doing - after all one can reasonably expect them to do all sort of nefarious things one can imagine and thus one is considered reasonably warned, it is about anybody (even friends and family) can happen to be a secret informant and collaborator. In case of USA the secretly imposed gag orders is a big step toward it.
- sneak 13y agoI signed up for Google Plus reluctantly, mostly just to use hangouts as Skype doesn't work on the ARM Chromebook. I don't use Facebook and I host my own email, mostly because I'd like to keep my social graph private. However, Google knows everyone I'd have added on Plus already - and offers to add them for me. How? They've all uploaded their address books, and they all use gmail. 80-90%+ of my social graph is already known to them, just because my friends have already given them the data. My lack of participation in Google Plus is insufficient.
- canvia 13y ago
- Eliezer 13y agoI think the phrase you're looking for is "Historical literacy informs Germans' view of U.S. surveillance programs".
- skore 13y agoThe Stasi has been around in some form or another until about 1990. A lot of us really have "been there".
- kephra 13y agoClarification: Merkel said "Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland", not “the Internet is new to all of us.”. Now Neuland does not just mean "new", but "new land". Similar as America or Africa was new land after 1500. So it means, the internet is ripe to conquer it. Merkel herself was a former Stasi member, known as IM-Erika (Informal Member Erika). Germany is currently tapping more phones, then DDR ever had. We do not have a PRISM scandal, but a law called Vorratsdatenspeicherung.
- lispm 13y agoWhat you write is misleading. Merkel was not a Stasi member and she was not known as 'IM Erika'. There are some rumors, but that's it mostly. The law 'Vorratsdatenspeicherung' is ruled unconstitutional by the 'Verfassungsgericht'. That the Internet is 'Neuland' is trivially true. I have been using the Internet since the mid 80s. But what we currently have is completely different, of a different quality and unprecedented.
- ytodo 13y agohttp://www.imagebanana.com/view/r8cwnbcl/satire_01_april_2012_mail3.jpg http://www.imagebanana.com/view/r8cwnbcl/satire_01_april_201... plz call it conspiracy, but mr.gauck was the one holding his thunbs on their secret files,...
- weinzierl 13y agoDagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same. The Stasi Records Agency is known in Germany as "Gauck Behörde"[1], because for ten years its head was the anti-communist civil rights activist Joachim Gauck. Gauck is now President of Germany and when Barack Obama was in Berlin they met and according to the schedule talked for one hour. I was curious which topics they discussed, but unfortunately it was not covered in the press. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Commissioner_for_the_Stasi_Archive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Commissioner_for_the_St...
- rustynails 13y agoMy son just asked why the English are so bad "spying on Europeans". I reassured him by saying that most western governments are almost cetainly corrupt (inc dear old Australia). And he who controls the databases controls the politicians, police, lawyers, judges ... You get the idea. And even better, just because you've got nothing to hide, it's easy for these databases to be changed by someone in the know. These systems are extremely dangerous, and should not be underestimated.
- vacri 13y agoLet's keep some perspective. The fear of the Stasi wasn't just 'are they tapping our phones?' If it was, they wouldn't have been so feared - just be careful on the phones. It was having a network of informants, such that you couldn't trust anyone, anywhere, that really caused the oppressive atmosphere. Americans are not living under the fear that if they mention something anti-government to a neighbour, they have a realistic chance of being carted off in the night.
- Amadou 13y agoMy favorite stasi joke: After the wall came down all the former stasi agents got jobs as taxi drivers - you get in the cab, tell the driver your name, and they already knew the address to take you home.
- qwertzlcoatl 13y agoGermans are referring to the States as Stasi 2.0. The new and improved updated version of tyranny.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago"Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited" The irony is palpable.