Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
theguardian.com
Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#2The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#3The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in making this distinction, though.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#4The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
My bank knows a huge amount about my finances, addresses, purchase history of almost everything and I'm sure lots else.
I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#5If you find this era interesting, I recently read the book "Burning down the Haus"[0]. Most histories I've read of the region and era focus a lot on the mechanics or politics of it, but the book was interesting to me in that it made you aware of the changes, the ebbs and flows of the East German security-state over time as they fought against even harmless "dissidents" and the abuses (and to a lesser extent incentives) to address those. Now I'm not bleeding-heart, but a lot of the tactics really start to look familiar. Modern America isn't that far removed from the Stasi.
[0] - https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-east-g...
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#6The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in making this distinction, though.
Precisely, when it comes to public companies and government entities, lines can blur and governments do have a track record of introducing laws and regulations to enable access.
Another way of thinking about it is - if the NSA wanted coca-cola's or KFC's secret recipe; They would already have it.
But social media as a whole, is for governmental security services, the greatest invention they never made.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#7The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in making this distinction, though.
That's likely a large party of why the NSA prioritized gaining access to their data through various programs, some of which have been exposed over the years. And when you're talking about nation states, even minor Hail Mary efforts have access to extensive resources sufficient to represent an entirely new sort of threat model to those companies. I doubt anyone at Google was worried about the risk of the NSA digging up their private fiber cables in the middle of nowhere with a backhoe to tap their internal communications prior to revelations about the program.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#8The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.
My bank knows a huge amount about my finances, addresses, purchase history of almost everything and I'm sure lots else. I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.
>I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.
If only that was what mattered. What also matters is what they're going to do with it in the future, along with what the people they're going to give it to will do with it, and what the people who steal it will do with it. (Not to mention what they're doing with it right now but not telling you).
My personal theory is that because injuries tend to heal eventually and also because they tend to physically hurt, people have a psychological tendency to underestimate the infinite future and also to underestimate anything that doesn't immediately result in physical pain.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#9The bus had stopped under an archway, sheltered from onlookers. Tina and the others asked the driver to open the back door for fresh air. One of them chatted to the driver, while the others let Bernd in through the back. The teenagers stood in the aisle to block the view. Bernd folded his almost 2m frame into the hidden space, and the girls piled their coats on top.
This is astonishingly brilliant.
Some 20 minutes later, one of their friends picked up the onboard mic and announced: “Our guest today, live in our show: Bernd Bergmann from the GDR!”
This is where they went wrong. They should have kept quiet about it after pulling it off, not announced it like they expected everyone to approve of what they had done.
They should have tried to sneak him off the bus. At most, they should have talked to their teacher or another adult to find out what they need to do now. They may not have known to take him to a police station so he could formally and officially "enter" the system/country.
All their lives they had been told to be brave in the face of injustice. Now they were being treated like criminals.
Well, duh. That's why it requires bravery to begin with. If everyone was going to pat you on the head for it, the problem wouldn't exist to begin with.
Re: Schoolgirls who defied the Stasi
#10This makes me wonder what the legacy effects of the Stasi today and one gauge of that would be a measure of age demographic uptake of social media for people who grew up under the Stasi and compare that to west german's of the same age demographic.
A quick dig into this and: https://www.internetworldstats.com/europa.htm proved a bit insightful, whilst this only has the data for Germany (as a whole as it is again with no East/West) it does show in contrast to other EU members a lower uptake of social media when you factor in internet access. Whilst Poland does show lower, if you scale in internet access you see that Germany per population is a lower uptake. You could also see some impact in previous communist countries, though for many, internet penitration is lower and that plays a factor. Bulgaria shows low usage but in relation to those with internet access - it is pretty high. So hard to see any true correlation. A better set of statistics would enable some true analysis. But on a quick glance, it would seem to of had a legacy impact upon people who grew up in that time who may well have a predisposition towards - not sharing personal information.