The Old DDR Defense - NSA Isn't as Bad as the Stasi, Insist Agency's Defenders

They aren't collecting our personal scents yet, they just stink! m/r

NSA Isn't as Bad as the Stasi, Insist Agency's Defenders - Reason.com

That's not as reassuring as they think

Gene Healy | November 19, 2013

… “Victims of the fearsome Communist East German secret police say: not so fast” to comparisons ofNational Security Agency spying with the Cold-War era Stasi, the Post reports.

The spy agency for the communist “German Democratic Republic” [DDR: Deutsche Demokratische Republik] employed over a quarter of a million East Germans — nearly 1 in 50 — as agents or informants.

Anyone “who dared criticize their government” — even in private — “could wind up disappearing into its penal system for years.”

The Post quotes the director of Berlin’s prison museum saying “the Stasi was a lot worse.” So we’ve got that going for us.

Of course the Stasi was orders of magnitude worse than the National Security Agency. How comforting should that be?

We don’t need to invoke the Stasi to understand the dangers of the NSA’s dragnet data collection. We can look to our own Cold War history, when the political class built files on thousands of peaceful dissenters, swept up millions of Americans’ private communications and used the information gathered to amass and maintain power.  …

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