In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In 190, Germany was reunified. In 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. The net effect of this is that person younger than 25 years old today - people who take the net for absolutely granted, just as we all take for granted today cars - has any personal memory of unspeakable abuses a European supervisory state, and what happens when it starts flexing his muscles. But now the technology that people use is the technology that is used against them on a 24 by 7.
We often make comparisons with the East German Stasi regarding the state of being deployed surveillance - despite the comparison to come short in two important aspects. First, monitoring is now the mind bogglingly further than East Germany Stasi never able to accomplish. The Stasi was the dreaded secret police of East Germany had a file on everyone, and that would disappear inconvenient people and pressure from the rest. Secondly, monitoring today is much more secretive - it has not (yet) started to use everything he knows about ordinary people against ordinary people
(There is a excellent film called Das Leben Der Anderen, life. other , which provides an overview of the cooling psyche bureaucrats monitoring and the time officers.)
the Eastern Europe monitoring states in general, and East Germany, in particular, not only open letters and phonecalls wiretap randomly. As it was not possible to open all the letters and wiretapping every phonecall, there was an extensive network of civilian informers among the population - people who had been recruited, often under threat or blackmail . It was not just one or two - records show that the informants numbered 174000, or one to forty people . In effect, this meant that informants were everywhere - it is easy to envision a typical day and see that in a place with more than 40 people, it is statistically at least one person who will report anything suspicious to an agency makes suspicious people disappear.
The "go away" was real. Often people know at least some of the informants. Children who have been raised in this environment were under strict orders from their parents never to speak to the children of informants, or at school or elsewhere, because if it looks like a bad word to this child, their father would disappear in the night. It was not a very pleasant company.
People were avoiding contact with informants.
This was a very effective way to maintain a tyrannical society. That did not stop growing resentment, but he stopped a growing movement. If someone close to you has expressed thoughts that could eliminate someone, there was the possibility that a third party could hear the conversation and you might as well go. There was also the possibility that they were a provocateur , someone would see if you agree. In this way, effectively isolated the climate of fear anyone trying to build against.
This culture of fear can also be a direct cause of the economic collapse of Eastern Europe, as there was a climate to remain a part of the gray mass rather than sticking to the crowd. Anyone can do better - read entrepreneurs -. Were thus slaughtered
Today, there are no people around us that we spy on behalf of the government. Instead, our own devices mean that, for the government, and they do it constantly, all the time, wherever we perform them. When people wanted to talk privately in East Germany, they go outside and talk while walking. When we want to talk privately today we will also outside, and above all, we leave behind all our electronic devices. (Not everyone does, too, but safety conscious among us do.)
In East Germany, informants were friends. What happens to the climate in society where your phone, your office and your walls are informants?
In the book and the film 1984 , there was the famous telescreen which allowed governments to look into someone's home. (We have those now, by the way.) In this scene, we also see the protagonist hide out of sight of the surveillance camera to get some coveted private moments. This is effectively where we are now.
What is going to do for our future? How will you prevent your phone, your office and your walls, and still have something resembling a social life and significant
Oh, and as a final note :? The name Stasi was an abbreviation of Ministerium for Staatssicherheit . It literally translates Department of State Security , but to see how the latest words are used today in the harbors of "ministry" (a place where people work the government) and "state "(country), more accurate modern translation would be National Security Agency .
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