
East Germany thrived on snitching lovers, fickle friends and envious schoolkids - walterbell
http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/stasi-snitches-all-around-records-reveal-true-extent-of-telling-on-others-20151116-gkzu44
======
jlg23
As politically incorrect as it seems to be now: The GDR thrived on people who
actually believed in what they did.

The trend to blame circumstances, pressure by authorities or psychological
factors like envy is just an attempt by many who once willingly, consciously
participated to now clear themselves of responsibility. As such, I don't see
much of a difference to post WW2-Germany when all Germans suddenly discovered
that they had been anti-fascist all the time.

I spent the first few years of my life in the GDR, moved to West Germany in
1989 just before the wall fell and moved back a few years later. We have seen
our Stasi-records, we know who snitched on us - it rarely were those
disappointed or envious. It were people who actually were much better off,
people who were convinced in the GDR's ideology and people who snitched on my
family as a career move. We also could clearly see that those who were real
friends did not provide information on us, even though they were asked to - in
those records they are labeled "useless as a source".

~~~
yourapostasy
In your opinion with your experience growing up in the GDR, and perhaps in the
opinion of your relatives who also lived in the GDR, what is the feasibility
of a "Stasi-lite" arising from the harvesting of social media-collected data,
and the "inter-personal" relationships built within social media contexts?
Where the key difference is the data is very happily volunteered by just-as-
fervent true believers in their pursuit of their micro-endorphin fixes of
validation, and there is ample room for envy to dig up data as well. And the
consumer of the data is not a coercive domestic intelligence apparatus, but
innumerable commercial entities trying to proactively shape your desires?

~~~
jlg23
I don't think one can make a meaningful comparison between Stasi- and post-
privacy era:

* you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience)

* Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by definition, not

* snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about yourself tends to be "good" things only

IMHO it is easy but very dangerous to liken the two because the latter has its
own, distinct nature, dangers and MOs which should be addressed on their
specific terms.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data
> voluntarily (at the cost of convenience)

I.e. you can opt to not read or write anything online, and communicate with
nobody, live underground, and never get ill? I'm not quite seeing it.

> Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by
> definition, not

Commercial entities themselves are often very centralized (there is a clear
chain of ownership and command) and can be themselves be embedded in and/or
used by more centralized organs. So one might as well say the Stasi wasn't
centralized because it consisted of innumerable spooks and informants. Think
of it as "The Stasi Cloud" or something, if that helps. Nothing is truly
centralized, if you split hairs enough.

> snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about
> yourself tends to be "good" things only

We're not talking about information that is volunteered when openly asked
though. And besides, that's besides the point. It is still a trampling on
basic human rights on pretty much a global scale, by all sorts of nations and
private entities.

When I cannot communicate with anyone by phone, email, or a social website
they can be bothered to use, then I do not have the right to have private
friendships much less any means to organize politically to step on any
powerful toes. I can't be a free human being without other free human beings.
So do I have that right, or not?

Sure, we got engineered into falling into trap voluntarily. It's no real
consolation, other than that we _could_ end it, _if_ weren't so addicted to
having new toys, preferably yesterday. But we are, and we don't, and if we
won't ever, then it's really just a matter of the political climate changing
drastically and widely once more, and then it may not change again for a long,
horrible time span.

Because another important difference between the Stasi and this is that there
is no outside. We're not just talking about today, at least I'm not, we know
what is possible and we see the world changing quickly.

> should be addressed on their specific terms

You only list things that are, in your opinion, different. What about what the
knowledge that anything you (digitally) say to anyone might be recorded
practically forever does in regards to self-censorship, how might it
ultimately even stump thought?

And what about the "decentralization of responsibility"? This can occur within
a monolithic bureaucracy, but how much more so in a dog eat dog just doing my
job world. And it's a very big factor in such things.

You don't _need_ strict, obvious centralization when you have enough people
following along voluntarily, or making up their own little rationalizations
why they do any of the 1000 voluntary things that ultimately all serve you
more than them. You need enough people, and enough technology to multiply
their power, and the rest just needs to be passive and/or divided.

You might convince me that there are several smaller and bigger Stasis, some
with just a little power, others with more, and that they overlap and differ
in various ways. Just like the actual people the actual Stasi consisted of
did. But other than that, I disagree on all points.

The desire of people to be free from surveillance by practically unaccountable
people who pull shit like wars of aggression, abductions, assassinations, can
never be "dangerous" enough. Yes, crying wolf is also not productive, but I
honestly think we're beyond that. There's _something_ in the pen, and the only
way to see how friendly or dangerous it is, is to call it out. If we're too
scared to even do that, to enforce human rights no matter who goes there, it
just might be a wolf.

I mean, how "should" things be addressed? So far what little activism and
education there was, has had very little results. It's not like the trend is
changing, or even slowing down. So okay, being too "dramatic" or whatever is
not okay, so what is okay? How big do you think the time window is?

~~~
yourapostasy
Extremely cogent points, thanks for bringing them up. Your "Sure, we got
engineered into falling into trap voluntarily." reminded me of the
Panopticon'ish quality of an increasing number of the social networks and data
nets we are forming. Who needs a Stasi, when the people themselves will
eagerly straitjacket themselves into the pre-determined, desired conformity of
whomever wields the power of this data corpora?

And it isn't just the sheer quantity and/or quality of the data either, that I
see as different from before. Like you pointed out, the sheer ability to store
the data indefinitely and efficiently retrieve it regardless of time passed
adds a new dimension and quality to surveillance capabilities that too few
outside the surveillance industry recognize.

------
mootothemax
_ENVY DROVE DENUNCIATIONS_

How thoroughly depressing. It still happens, though.

I recently met someone who works at the local tax office here in Poland, and
found out that the area I live in is notorious for the large number of "Mr So-
and-so is driving a new car, and I think it's because he hasn't paid his
taxes!"-type reports from my neighbours.

Apparently it's endemic; any time someone shows up with a new _something_ , a
phonecall is made from a different neighbour to the tax authorities.

As much as I believe in paying one's taxes - and for the avoidance of doubt:
I'm a _very_ honest taxpayer! - the whole business left me feeling somewhat
uneasy.

~~~
golergka
It's a complicated topic.

In russian culture, for example, you cover your friend and even your
neighbour, even if he did something worse than not paying his taxes. Even if
it's a husband beating his wife, and you decide to call the cops, people still
will look at you in a certain way.

Surely, you would agree that this level of disdain for authorities is not very
heealthy too.

~~~
varjag
It's even more complicated. With all the outward cultural disdain for the
"rats", Russians do not hesitate to write secret or anonymous reports to
authorities. It's prison culture meeting communist morality.

------
sveme
For anyone interested in the sort of schemes the Stasi applied to get their
snitches, the German television drama Weissensee [1] is a really great
resource. It follows a Stasi officer family's journey through the eighties and
in that achieves to paint a very nuanced picture of the motivations of both
Stasi officers and the opposition. Unfortunately, not available with English
subtitles...

[1]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1525780/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1525780/)

~~~
Tomte
I cannot recommend "The Lives of Others" enough.

Won an Academy Award in 2006 for best foreign film.

Ebert review:
[http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...](http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070920/REVIEWS/70920002)

Another, very moving, review: [http://www.nationalreview.com/content/great-
lives](http://www.nationalreview.com/content/great-lives)

And the film has two or three great Honecker jokes. :-)

------
codeshaman
Imagine if Stasi had unrestricted access to the databases of Facebook or
Google.. What state could they have built !

Oh no, those days are over - people have learned their lessons and it can't
happen again!

If you didn't smell the sarcasm in the previous sentence, then you've got to
do some living in other countries.

Because not only history can repeat itself, it already _is_ repeating itself
in many parts of the world, but now with these powerful data storage and data
mining tools that we, the idealists, have so passionately crafted (and open
sourced) in order to create a "better" world.

Cross-reference Facebook friends, search engine queries, music, movies and
porn habits of individuals and you've got nice buckets were you can place
people.

What you do with the buckets of people ( who succeeds and who fails in
society, who gets promoted, hired or published, who gets to travel abroad and
even who lives and who dies) depends on the current ideological or political
requirements.

The point I'm trying to make is that in the future you won't need informants
-- most information about us is out there somewhere - and theoretically it can
outlive us or survive enough to feed the decision tools of some crazy future
regimes or social experiments run by "rogue" AI.

If this happens, then the future will be a very strange and dark place.

~~~
mvidal01
This fear is why William Binney did what he did.

------
ibarrac
This happens today in Cuba, where many of the same techniques of repression
were copied from East Germany.

As a young Pioneer I was told to inform on my parents if I heard any talk
disparaging the government or Communism at home. There are neighborhood
organizations called CDR (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) that
know what everyone is doing and will report any hint of dissent or any
suspicious meetings. Snitching is encouraged as the patriotic duty of every
citizen.

~~~
crdb
> Snitching is encouraged as the patriotic duty of every citizen

This is true of most countries, differing only by degree. A state has two
choices for internal security: a small professional force that reacts quickly
to flagged problems or a full scale surveillance state (as the Russians had in
Moscow, where it was extremely hard for agents to operate due to the sheer
number of KGB staff). The latter solution is usually not applied, or applied
only partially, due to being prohibitively expensive even in a modern state.

For example, the FBI only has 35,000 employees. Even if each was dedicated to
surveillance, that would be one employee per 9,000 American residents.
Instead, they rely on the population approaching existing civil services
(police departments, fire brigades, city halls) with suspicious activity;
those that look genuine are further investigated and acted on.

The French government has recently published posters and a website [1]
encouraging members of the Muslim community to highlight any recent
radicalisation candidates. This obviously follows recent events but might also
be linked to the systematic defunding and shifting around of internal security
organisations (RG, DST, DGSI...) in the last decade or two resulting in the
loss of the HUMINT network within the population. That FBI ratio, calculated
for the DGSI? 1 employee for 20,000 residents.

[1] [http://static1.stop-
djihadisme.gouv.fr/var/stop/storage/imag...](http://static1.stop-
djihadisme.gouv.fr/var/stop/storage/images/media/images/radicalisation/607-6-fre-
FR/radicalisation.png)

~~~
marknutter
Except that snitching about unpatriotic activities does not happen on a large
scale here in America. People are far more interested in their immediate,
personal safety and the safety of their property than monitoring their
neighbor's patriotic tendencies (or lack thereof). Big difference.

------
jernfrost
Scary stuff. Even scarier that we seem to have learned so little from these
mistakes. In the US people cling to their guns in the thought that those guns
somehow protect against a future tyranny. While the massive archives of the
NSA on everybody is what would give more power than any guns for a future
Tyranny.

If the NSA has vacuumed all sort of information about everybody, a future
dictatorship can easily reuse this stored information to create profiles of
potential enemies of the regime.

------
eru
Article taken from [http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/east-german-
dome...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/east-german-domestic-
surveillance-went-far-beyond-the-stasi-a-1042883.html) and German original at
[http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-135800944.html](http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-135800944.html)

------
nraynaud
I don't think "thriving" is the right word, the state never felt secure.

And it's a problem, I often call the reaction to terrorism "the East German
fallacy", the idea that sweeping spying, denunciations and unfair prosecution
makes everybody safer. It doesn't, people were risking their lives jumping the
wall. Now it's even worse, there is no wall, there is simply no place you can
go without being spyed upon if you are electronically connected.

------
rdancer
The article confounds snitching and counter-espionage. It was a time of war,
and should that war turn hot, most of East Germany would be reduced to
radioactive rubble, with most people dead or dying. If somebody went over to
West Berlin never to return, they were defecting to the enemy. It is no wonder
that the measures were drastic.

------
upofadown
Perhaps the reason that there is not more academic interest here is that the
result is so obvious. If a state provides a mechanism for denunciation without
any possible consequence then there is inevitably going to be a lot of
denunciation; much of it fabricated.

------
theworstshill
Pretty much the same motivations as today - people reporting twitter/etc...
posts to your employeers/etc... as soon as a non politically correct, non-
conformist opinion is mentioned. And thats without even mentioning the NSA.

