 merrie says: A new level of insanity has been reached, Obama wants people who are bad-mouthing his legislation reported. Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi?currentPage=all Ulrike Poppe used to be one of the most surveilled women in East Germany. For 15 years, agents of the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service) followed her, bugged her phone and home, and harassed her unremittingly, right up until she and other dissidents helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. One shelf, just to the left of her desk, is special. It holds a pair of 3-inch-thick black binders " copies of the most important documents in Poppe's secret police files. This is her Stasi shelf. Poppe learned to recognize many of the men assigned to tail her each day. They had crew cuts and never wore jeans or sneakers. Sometimes they took pictures of her on the sidewalk, or they piled into a white sedan and drove 6 feet behind her as she walked down the street. When the wall fell, the Stasi fell with it. The new government, determined to bring to light the agency’s totalitarian tactics, created a special commission to give victims access to their personal files. Poppe and her husband were among the first people in Germany allowed into the archives. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time... Imagine the outcry from the media and the left (redundant, I know) if Bush had done something like this. Russia and other communist countries used this tactic often where even people's children would report unwanted political behavior to the government. I guess that is next. Funny how the left didn't like the idea of the government ease dropping on terrorists, but they endorse neighbors ease dropping on neighbors over differing political views. I guess we know who they see as their biggest enemy. |
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