This is as useful as comparing the number of bullets the US Army has today with the number of rifles the 1985 Nationale Volksarmee (army of East Germany) had.
The article compares the hypothetical amount of data to be stored in a NSA data center to the records storage area of the Stasi.
That is, a guess at the amount of data one facility of a modern signals intelligence agency (belonging to a super-power) is being compared to the amount of record keeping space a cold war era security agency (belonging to a Soviet client-state) possessed. The two agencies have vastly different missions (state security versus signals intelligence), operated at vastly different scales, and in completely different eras. The two facilities being compared are not at all similar. A large computing facility (probably processing raw data) is being compared to a large library archive (largely storing files and documents generated by the agency).
No valid conclusions could possibly be drawn from this comparison. The closest we could come to a valid conclusion is; if we printed out 5 zettabytes of data we would have wasted a lot of paper.
Edit: What I'm trying to say is that this is an apple to oranges comparison made across space and time.
The National Security Agency is a cryptolgic agency tasked with gathering foreign signals intelligence and providing information assurance services to the United States Government (especially the military).
The Ministry for State Security was a secret police / intelligence service tasked with a broad range of powers focused in keeping the party strong as evidenced by their motto "Schild und Schwert der Partei" (Sword and shield of the Party). They were primarily responsible for internal surveillance of people that were deemed enemies of the party and the personal protection of party leaders.
It's pretty clear that a catch all secret police / security intelligence agency is different to a foreign signals intelligence agency.
I am comparing the official missions of the Stasi and NSA which are significantly different.
If your argument is that the NSA is not acting in accordance to its mission, or that abuses are taking place, or that the NSA is acting like the Stasi that's something else entirely, completely separate to what I'm discussing.
I'm pointing out that these are different agencies with different roles and responsibilities, and trying to draw parallels between an NSA data center and a Stasi archive is not really useful.
>> that's something else entirely, completely separate to what I'm discussing.
Aha I see. The NSA and Stasi are collecting vast amounts of data on everybody living in their countries. Data that was and will be abused to ruin innocent lives. But you prefer to discuss in this topic something "entirely, completely separate".
This is a discussion on an article that compares an NSA data center to the Stasi archives. I chose to discuss how I find that comparison fallacious.
I am arguing that the NSA is not like the Stasi. They had different goals, different authorization, and different modus operandi. You're arguing that the NSA is bad (because they are like the Stasi). Whether the NSA is bad or not is orthogonal to my discussion.
To directly answer your reply:
1. The Stasi doesn't collect vast amounts of anything any more.
2. Has the NSA used data to ruin innocent lives? Have you any evidence that they will do so in the future?
Isn't it obvious that anyone can accuse anyone of anything? Usually it's more meaningful when they have evidence.
[edit: since this is receiving downvotes - clearly we have evidence that the NSA is dangerously overreaching and should stop. We have absolutely zero evidence that it is their mission to keep an elite in power 'at any cost']
Whereas the means of storage are different, don't be so quick to dismiss the comparison based on the purposes of the two organizations. In official/propaganda terms, Stasi was depicted by the German state much in the same way that the US is depicting the NSA today.
Well, I guess it is safe to say that the Stasi would have sucked up and stored zettabytes if they had the capability to do so.
So, the implication that the NSA is much worse than the Stasi is wrong. But they don't seem to be any better, at least when it comes to data collection. That is not very comforting.
No data is random, information is data put into context.
Stasi didn't capture random noise. They captured activity from suspicious people. They weren't actually data mining but eavesdropping. They knew who their targets where, who they found suspicious.
Contrast that with the NSA who are looking to see if there are people who are suspicious that they then "pull a stasi" on.
Consider it from the position of somebody in "upper management".
1. Technology lets a NSA employee do orders of magnitude more work than a Stasi employee.
2. Every employee may be a traitor or merely overly ambitious, but gains knowledge of how to evade detection while obtaining privileged information and taking advantage of it as a side-effect of working for you. As your organization grows you have to spend a lot of resources on internal policing.
3. Fewer employees also means fewer potential whistle-blowers.
Even without budgetary constraints, the NSA is well motivated to employ a much smaller percentage of the population than the Stasi did, assuming they are equally invasive. The ideal they are probably striving for is a completely automated NSA that reports only to the glorious leader.
while glorious leader sounds good too, after watching "Dictator" allow me to correct you - it is "supreme leader". Btw, the supreme leader suggested that US could have been able to spy on its citizens if US were a dictatorship instead of democracy. :)
I wanted to highlight the difficulty the Easter Germans face when considering that 3% of the their population was actively spying on the other portion. Not to mention the large number of people who had something nasty to say about their neighbor.
