You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi
from the compare-and-contrast dept
Republished from ProPublica under a Creative Commons license.
The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime.
But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today's standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed.
The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an "aunt," "Operational Case Jentzsch," presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German poet who defected to the West in 1976), places ("church"), and meetings ("by post, by phone, meeting in Hungary").
Gary Bruce, an associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo and the author of "The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi," helped me decode the graphic and other files. I was surprised at how crude the surveillance was. "Their main surveillance technology was mail, telephone, and informants," Bruce said.
Another file revealed a low-level surveillance operation called an IM-vorgang aimed at recruiting an unnamed target to become an informant. (The names of the targets were redacted; the names of the Stasi agents and informants were not.) In this case, the Stasi watched a rather boring high school student who lived with his mother and sister in a run-of-the-mill apartment. The Stasi obtained a report on him from the principal of his school and from a club where he was a member. But they didn't have much on him — I've seen Facebook profiles with far more information.
A third file documented a surveillance operation known as an OPK, for Operative Personenkontrolle, of a man who was writing oppositional poetry. The Stasi deployed three informants against him but did not steam open his mail or listen to his phone calls. The regime collapsed before the Stasi could do anything further.
I also obtained a file that contained an "observation report," in which Stasi agents recorded the movements of a forty-year-old man for two days — September 28 and 29, 1979. They watched him as he dropped off his laundry, loaded up his car with rolls of wallpaper, and drove a child in a car "obeying the speed limit," stopping for gas and delivering the wallpaper to an apartment building. The Stasi continued to follow the car as a woman drove the child back to Berlin.
The Stasi agent appears to have started following the target at 4:15 p.m. on a Friday evening. At 9:38 p.m., the target went into his apartment and turned out the lights. The agent stayed all night and handed over surveillance to another agent at 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning. That agent appears to have followed the target until 10:00 p.m. From today's perspective, this seems like a lot of work for very little information.
And yet, the Stasi files are an important reminder of what a repressive regime can do with so little information. You can view the complete files at ProPublica.
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Just a reminder:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130627/15455123642/former-east-german-stasi-officer-expre sses-admiration-dismay-us-governments-surveillance-capabilities.shtml
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.”
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Re: Just a reminder:
Now if the man bit the dog, that would be a story.
And a broken clock is still right twice a day. And he is. But still, ex-Stasi department head. If he were anything but appalled at 90% of what the US does, I'd think he was probably an old double agent.
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Re: Just a reminder:
It's a telling side-note that Austria and Germany do not allow the collection of initials or birthdays in clinical trials. This leads to some problems for those in the pharma industry and academia, and most assume it's arbitrary. What most don't realize is that the Austrians and Germans understand better than most the power of metadata.
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Note of Interest
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/analysts-notebook/
The program can store a surprising amount of data with many different dimensions and connections to it. (Many on Many connections make for wonderful tools) The problem is getting a good analyst to eyeball it and then take it from being data to intelligence. And, just like any database, it is only as good as the data that has been THOUGHTFULLY put into it.
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so does
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Re: so does
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Re: so does
To put it simply:
You can opt out of having your data collected by Google, you cannot do the same for the NSA.
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Re: so does
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Re: Re: so does
When we say Google is optional, we aren't talking about Google's opt-out mechanism. We're talking about a combination of not using Google services and blocking access to Google's servers. Logging in doesn't enter into it.
But, you're right -- opt-out is is the wrong way around. Everything should be opt-in. But opt-out is better than nothing.
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Stasi
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Re: Stasi
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Re: Re: Stasi
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4443934.stm
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Re: Re: Re: Stasi
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the technique was first done by a NAZI
My question to all you whom think nazis are great....do you really want to live in that type a world...cause one day......they might come for YOU
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Re: the technique was first done by a NAZI
Is that you?
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Re:
Not just the Stasi. The Chinese, too -- remember the (excellent) movie "Red Square"? They set up China as an oppressive surveillance state by showing all the CCTV cameras they had around. And don't forget the Soviet Union.
We have become yet another example of the truism "you become what you hate."
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Re:
This sort of thing has been going on since, forever.
To imply it is a recent development is is simply being naive.
Maybe someday humans will stop being assholes ... nah, that will never happen.
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My last name is Jentzsch
The NSA and Stasi comparison should give everyone pause.
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technologically primitive yes ,but not out-dated. Physical surveillance is more accurate.
Imagine if our Seal Teams or Military Snipers relied on metadata, or our LEOs only scanned the plates of drivers.
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You know what else the Sasi did?
Sorry, this guilt by vague association doesn't fly. The "metadata" argument fails for easily explained reasons (and that's shooting fish in a barrel), not cause some past bad guys did it.
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Re: You know what else the Sasi did?
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The STASI had help
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Smurfs are Blue
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Re: Smurfs are Blue
I suspect that most people who use the internet to a great extent have deeply incorporated it into their daily lives. Cutting themselves off from it would be a huge, painful, lifestyle change. People don't like huge, painful, lifestyle changes. It's a lot easier just to tell yourself "well, I have nothing to hide" and ignore the whole issue.
Yes, it's selling out your neighbors and counrymen for the sake of your own comfort, but that's human nature in action.
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Stasi
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