Four decades of domination over almost all aspects of life in East Germany came to an abrupt halt exactly 25 years ago today. On 31 March 1990, one of the most intrusive surveillance organisations in human history, the Ministry for State Security, more infamously known as the Stasi, was dissolved.
Two months ago I was at the old Stasi headquarters, today a museum in Berlin, for an open daycommemorating the storming of the building by East Germans a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell. There were film screenings, discussions, information stands and a tour through the Stasi’s enormous archive that at one point contained files on an estimated six million people. Some say a file was kept for one in three citizens.
It took me an hour to wander through the archive. Thousands of Germans visiting the site appeared shell-shocked amid the labyrinth of corridors and ceiling-high filing cabinets that had documented and controlled their lives – or the lives of others – for years. The very building, with its grey concrete Communist-era architecture, was a symbol of fear – the place you were taken for interrogation or intimidation.
While the Stasi archive is overwhelming, today’s spies can gather far more information with a fraction of the effort.
The Snowden revelations suggest the NSA can collect 5 billion records of mobile phone location a day and 42 billion internet records – including email and browsing history – a month.
German organisation OpenDataCity estimates that while the Stasi archives would fill 48,000 filing cabinets, just one US government server could store so much data that, if printed out, the reams of paper would fill 42 trillion filing cabinets.
We know very little about what the NSA does with all this data. But, leaving historical parallels aside, the Stasi archive is a timely warning of the potential consequences of unchecked surveillance. It shows how quickly a system for identifying threats evolves into a desire to know everything about everyone.
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