9 ms·

Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

377 points by harrisonpowers 13y ago

sentenza 13y ago
Fun fact: The NSA actually requested data that was collected by the STASI in East Germany. http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=de&to=en&a=netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimdienste-und-polizei-nutzen-stasi-akten-auch-amerikanische-behorden-wie-die-nsa/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=de&to=en&a=n... German original: https://netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimdienste-und-polizei-nutzen-stasi-akten-auch-amerikanische-behorden-wie-die-nsa/ https://netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimd...
- weinzierl 13y ago
  Just yesterday the former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives and civil rights activist Johannes Gauck met with Barack Obama.
  - Argorak 13y ago
    To clarify for those that don't know: Gauck is now the president of Germany, so he didn't meet Obama because of his history. Also, his first name is Joachim.
paganel 13y ago
For once I'll avoid Godwin's law and link instead to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 > The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of nonnotable innocents. (...) Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So the point is that even in Soviet Russia people were sent into the Gulag based on written laws and going through the legal system, so I'd say that the US Government's reply that "it's all legal! it has gone through the courts" doesn't mean a thing as long as said laws are against the spirit of the US Constitution. And I'd say that's the gist of it, the current laws are against the spirit of the original fundamental law of the United States. As long as its current citizens are ok with that (no mass protests etc) then I'd say there's nothing that the minority can do (if it matters I'm not from the US)
- jsmcgd 13y ago
  Godwin's Law, or people's interpretation of it, has a lot to answer for. It's perfectly acceptable to make comparisons to the Nazis if it's relevant to where a conversation is at, at a particular moment. Not only is acceptable, it should also be encouraged. The most valuable thing to emerge from World War Two was the anti-blueprint for society. Let's not make this taboo merely for the sake of falling foul of some internet meme.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    The problem is that references to the Nazis or Soviets are very hard to get right without tripping over the slippery slope argument. Hitler was not only a vegetarian, he was a health fanatic, and there's evidence that it informed his obsession with purifying the race. That's doesn't make any number of locavore glutenfree vegan hipsters a step towards nazism. Hitler "militarized" society, and emphasized such organisations as the Hitler Youth where kids learned discipline, healthy living and love of the outdoors. Does that tell us anything meaningful about the boy scouts? Yes, Hitler and Stalin spied a lot on their own populations for "national security" purposes, but we should be able to oppose surveillance on it's own merits with out resorting to the painting a (fallacious) slippery slope picture where the next frame is a KZ/Gulag camp.
    - gasull 13y ago
      Gulags and concentration camps weren't set the same day they set the surveillance. Those came afterwards.
      - mseebach 13y ago
        Indeed. Making the causal link all the more slippery.
        gasull 13y ago
        The point I'm trying to make is that having surveillance in place gives them the power of effectively building such camps later.
alan_cx 13y ago
What I wonder is at what point words like stasi become reasonable or acceptable. OK, I don't like what is happening, and almost day by day thing happen that I feel are pushing the west, led by the US, more and more towards something highly controlled and not in any way free. Liberty is slowly being eroded, and I genuinely feel that is a true statement objectively. Right now, words like stasi, fascist, etc are an exaggeration, but used by people who see it going that way. They use such words to warn, but we all know those words do not really stand up objectively. So, what is the tipping point, what has to happen for such words to actually apply? Or is it merely a case of presentation? If society, superficially, doesn't look like old Nazi Germany, is that enough for a majority to be content, even if underling that is something deeply nasty?
- adaml_623 13y ago
  It's a good question but the story of the frog in the slowly heating pot of water comes to mind. At what temperature should the frog really get worried?
  - xradionut 13y ago
    It's too late for the general population in the US. But there are very smart folks with means that have hedged their bets by having estates in multiple countries.
- grey-area 13y ago
  The Stasi were the secret police for Eastern Germany, nothing to do with the Nazis as far as I know. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi wasn't really as extensive as (for example) collecting all phone records for the entire country, so in some ways the US has surpassed the Stasi in surveillance, while in others obviously it's nowhere near the same situation (e.g. in-person surveillance and recruiting ordinary citizens as spies), and in other areas it's similar - secret courts and sweeping warrants etc. I suppose the point of the comparison is to shock, and then perhaps point out that there are some areas in which the current situation is worse than it was in Eastern Germany.
  - 13y ago
adaml_623 13y ago
I've got an answer for all the people who say, "I've got nothing to hide". That might be true but you would have to be naive to think that the information that could be gathered from these NSA activities would not be misused by people. Imagine an up and coming politician. Squeaky clean but was friends with a few people who got prosecuted for drug dealing. Those useful NSA phone records could easily lead to the press asking the young idealist if he often hung around with drug users. Irrelevant and potentially career ending. Civil rights campaigners who could be accused of having an affair because of call records. A journalist investigating a corrupt politician... is he a terrorist sympathizer... comb through the records. You may have nothing to hide but often the people trying to improve your country for the better and root out corruption and crime will be more vulnerable to this. Because the corrupt individuals in positions of power will not respect the laws and procedures and will use this information for evil. Thoughts?
- triplesec 13y ago
  Watch this classic lawyer's talk, and understand that "nothing to hide" is still no protection against talking ti authorities, even non-malicious ones. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
  - Martijn 13y ago
    I wonder if this is also true if you are a foreigner visiting the US. And I wonder if this also works for the Dutch police.
    - 286c8cb04bda 13y ago
      > I wonder if this is also true if you are a foreigner visiting the US. It won't work on Customs and Immigration. When you're talking to them you're not "in the US" yet. After that, yes, the privilege against self-incrimination is granted to everyone in the United States, citizen or not. > And I wonder if this also works for the Dutch police. The privilege in question is considered an essential component of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Most other countries based on English common law have something similar. You'll have to look for parallel support within the Dutch legal system.
uptown 13y ago
This whole thing has reminded me how prescient the movie "Sneakers" was. "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!" "The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."
- sneak 13y ago
  From getting paid for pentesting to phreaking to the nick I've used for fifteen+ years, that movie changed and shaped my life indelibly.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    I missed it when it first came out, and only saw it for the first time about 2 years ago. I've probably watched it 20+ times since then. It really is a great movie.
Spooky23 13y ago
The fact that these conversations are happening is indicative that we do not have a Stasi. We have serious problems, as evidence by the unwillingness of any member of Congress to really speak out on the issue, and the sheer scope and reach power of this poorly regulated surveillance regime. There's no gulag archipelago, but the tools used by repressive totalitarian regimes are being built for other purposes, and many of us believe that these tools are not compatible with a free and democratic society. Let's focus on the real and stop running down the slippery slope.
- pmichaud 13y ago
  I'm not so sure. Europeans stopped conquering and colonizing in favor of economic colonialism, which is just as bad perhaps, but now with a veneer of credibility. They are just doing business. Nevermind that the despot du jour was installed by the CIA. Similarly we can talk about NSA overreaches all we want, as opposed to the old way of actually silencing the dissent. Great, except everyone is just talking, they are probably continuing with impunity under a different program name.
  - Spooky23 13y ago
    In East Germany, this thread would likely have led to our arrest.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      In a free country on the other hands, every last (healthy adult) citizen would be able to think without employing sophistry, and to see woods despite the trees.
mtgx 13y ago
As for the "potential" chilling effect of all the spying, you don't need to theorize about whether it will happen or not. It's already happening: http://www.france24.com/en/20130619-us-seizure-journalist-records-called-chilling http://www.france24.com/en/20130619-us-seizure-journalist-re... The 4th amendment is all but obliterated, and now this is how the 1st amendment and the freedom of the press will be destroyed, too, by killing any sort of investigative journalism left, and by prosecuting all leakers. I used to think that Wikileaks and other such secure leaking is the future of investigative journalism. If you believe the print media will die, and blogging will take its place, then investigative journalism will die, too, because I doubt many bloggers will go out and do that. So in a way Wikileaks would serve as a "disruptive innovation" for investigative journalism. Actually, most investigative journalism is only about finding "sources" that are willing to leak stuff to them, anyway. Wikileaks is kind of a "user-generated" investigative journalism/leaking, or investigative journalism 2.0. But if the government is trying to kill both at once, then I'm not sure what's left to uncover illegalities inside the government.
gyardley 13y ago
Is there anything in this article, aside from an overblown metaphor in the title, that hasn't been posted here fifty times in the last couple weeks?
- toddmatthews 13y ago
  its written by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
  - mpyne 13y ago
    So, no?
- ginsong 13y ago
  If Snowden has convincing evidence why is he not releasing it? I don't understand all the dancing around.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Propaganda/PR is not just a tool for the government and corporations. I have to give Snowden credit for that, at least.
squozzer 13y ago
The current uproar will do us no good unless we develop ways to either disrupt the technology or protect ourselves from it. Because even if we win this round, the state will find ways to bring these programs back in some other guise. For example, the FISA courts were part of the reforms that emerged from the abuses of the CIA and FBI during the Red Scare and Civil Rights eras. In other words, we need a technical Rosa Parks. Well, more like a million of them.
minikites 13y ago
In all the talk about this, I haven't seen any proposed solutions. What is the way out? Stop all domestic surveillance? What about US Citizens in other countries? What about foreign nationals inside the US? Increase oversight? What about for rare unambiguous national security threats? How can that be enforced? And it sounds a lot like learned helplessness, but what is an individual supposed to do?
- xradionut 13y ago
  Don't cause waves, pay taxes.
mholkesvik 13y ago
The NSA leak is troubling, yes. It is NOT comparable to the horrors of communist authoritarianism - where 20 million people were killed, starved, or simply disappeared. To me, this seems like a cheap shock tactic more common on stations like Fox News where the labels "nazi" or "socialist" are thrown around without thought. These words have deep historical roots and deep meaning, and to use them in situations where it isn't appropriate is trivializing. A government can be intrusive and overstep its bounds without earning the label of 'Stasi'. We can have a conversation about the power and role of government in this country without drawing these hyperbolic and historically inaccurate parallels.
microcolonel 13y ago
There is no hope if that's the extent of the “solution”, no meaningful work will come in the form of more politics and oppression. The only reasonable conclusion is that to stop the bloodshed and invasion, one must stop supporting the oppressors. You are quite literally paying many thousands of thugs to fly to the middle east and support a paedophilic, incompetent, oppressive regime which directly hurts people's lives. At home you're paying many more thousands to pick on people carrying small amounts of plant trimmings, specifically targeted by the colour of their skin. Those people are then sent to buildings and force fed in contract-incestuous CEO-laden prisons with an economic incentive to cost more money to their handlers. Aggression is the problem, and paying people to use it against you, or anyone else for that matter, is probably not going to help.

377 points by harrisonpowers 13y ago

Fun fact: The NSA actually requested data that was collected by the STASI in East Germany. http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=de&to=en&a=netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimdienste-und-polizei-nutzen-stasi-akten-auch-amerikanische-behorden-wie-die-nsa/ http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=de&to=en&a=n... German original: https://netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimdienste-und-polizei-nutzen-stasi-akten-auch-amerikanische-behorden-wie-die-nsa/ https://netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimd...

weinzierl 13y ago
Just yesterday the former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives and civil rights activist Johannes Gauck met with Barack Obama.
- Argorak 13y ago
  To clarify for those that don't know: Gauck is now the president of Germany, so he didn't meet Obama because of his history. Also, his first name is Joachim.

paganel 13y ago

For once I'll avoid Godwin's law and link instead to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 > The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of nonnotable innocents. (...) Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So the point is that even in Soviet Russia people were sent into the Gulag based on written laws and going through the legal system, so I'd say that the US Government's reply that "it's all legal! it has gone through the courts" doesn't mean a thing as long as said laws are against the spirit of the US Constitution. And I'd say that's the gist of it, the current laws are against the spirit of the original fundamental law of the United States. As long as its current citizens are ok with that (no mass protests etc) then I'd say there's nothing that the minority can do (if it matters I'm not from the US)

jsmcgd 13y ago
Godwin's Law, or people's interpretation of it, has a lot to answer for. It's perfectly acceptable to make comparisons to the Nazis if it's relevant to where a conversation is at, at a particular moment. Not only is acceptable, it should also be encouraged. The most valuable thing to emerge from World War Two was the anti-blueprint for society. Let's not make this taboo merely for the sake of falling foul of some internet meme.
- mseebach 13y ago
  The problem is that references to the Nazis or Soviets are very hard to get right without tripping over the slippery slope argument. Hitler was not only a vegetarian, he was a health fanatic, and there's evidence that it informed his obsession with purifying the race. That's doesn't make any number of locavore glutenfree vegan hipsters a step towards nazism. Hitler "militarized" society, and emphasized such organisations as the Hitler Youth where kids learned discipline, healthy living and love of the outdoors. Does that tell us anything meaningful about the boy scouts? Yes, Hitler and Stalin spied a lot on their own populations for "national security" purposes, but we should be able to oppose surveillance on it's own merits with out resorting to the painting a (fallacious) slippery slope picture where the next frame is a KZ/Gulag camp.
  - gasull 13y ago
    Gulags and concentration camps weren't set the same day they set the surveillance. Those came afterwards.
    - mseebach 13y ago
      Indeed. Making the causal link all the more slippery.
      - gasull 13y ago
        The point I'm trying to make is that having surveillance in place gives them the power of effectively building such camps later.

alan_cx 13y ago

What I wonder is at what point words like stasi become reasonable or acceptable. OK, I don't like what is happening, and almost day by day thing happen that I feel are pushing the west, led by the US, more and more towards something highly controlled and not in any way free. Liberty is slowly being eroded, and I genuinely feel that is a true statement objectively. Right now, words like stasi, fascist, etc are an exaggeration, but used by people who see it going that way. They use such words to warn, but we all know those words do not really stand up objectively. So, what is the tipping point, what has to happen for such words to actually apply? Or is it merely a case of presentation? If society, superficially, doesn't look like old Nazi Germany, is that enough for a majority to be content, even if underling that is something deeply nasty?

adaml_623 13y ago
It's a good question but the story of the frog in the slowly heating pot of water comes to mind. At what temperature should the frog really get worried?
- xradionut 13y ago
  It's too late for the general population in the US. But there are very smart folks with means that have hedged their bets by having estates in multiple countries.
grey-area 13y ago
The Stasi were the secret police for Eastern Germany, nothing to do with the Nazis as far as I know. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi wasn't really as extensive as (for example) collecting all phone records for the entire country, so in some ways the US has surpassed the Stasi in surveillance, while in others obviously it's nowhere near the same situation (e.g. in-person surveillance and recruiting ordinary citizens as spies), and in other areas it's similar - secret courts and sweeping warrants etc. I suppose the point of the comparison is to shock, and then perhaps point out that there are some areas in which the current situation is worse than it was in Eastern Germany.
- 13y ago

adaml_623 13y ago

I've got an answer for all the people who say, "I've got nothing to hide". That might be true but you would have to be naive to think that the information that could be gathered from these NSA activities would not be misused by people. Imagine an up and coming politician. Squeaky clean but was friends with a few people who got prosecuted for drug dealing. Those useful NSA phone records could easily lead to the press asking the young idealist if he often hung around with drug users. Irrelevant and potentially career ending. Civil rights campaigners who could be accused of having an affair because of call records. A journalist investigating a corrupt politician... is he a terrorist sympathizer... comb through the records. You may have nothing to hide but often the people trying to improve your country for the better and root out corruption and crime will be more vulnerable to this. Because the corrupt individuals in positions of power will not respect the laws and procedures and will use this information for evil. Thoughts?

triplesec 13y ago
Watch this classic lawyer's talk, and understand that "nothing to hide" is still no protection against talking ti authorities, even non-malicious ones. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
- Martijn 13y ago
  I wonder if this is also true if you are a foreigner visiting the US. And I wonder if this also works for the Dutch police.
  - 286c8cb04bda 13y ago
    > I wonder if this is also true if you are a foreigner visiting the US. It won't work on Customs and Immigration. When you're talking to them you're not "in the US" yet. After that, yes, the privilege against self-incrimination is granted to everyone in the United States, citizen or not. > And I wonder if this also works for the Dutch police. The privilege in question is considered an essential component of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Most other countries based on English common law have something similar. You'll have to look for parallel support within the Dutch legal system.

uptown 13y ago

This whole thing has reminded me how prescient the movie "Sneakers" was. "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!" "The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."

sneak 13y ago
From getting paid for pentesting to phreaking to the nick I've used for fifteen+ years, that movie changed and shaped my life indelibly.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I missed it when it first came out, and only saw it for the first time about 2 years ago. I've probably watched it 20+ times since then. It really is a great movie.

Spooky23 13y ago

The fact that these conversations are happening is indicative that we do not have a Stasi. We have serious problems, as evidence by the unwillingness of any member of Congress to really speak out on the issue, and the sheer scope and reach power of this poorly regulated surveillance regime. There's no gulag archipelago, but the tools used by repressive totalitarian regimes are being built for other purposes, and many of us believe that these tools are not compatible with a free and democratic society. Let's focus on the real and stop running down the slippery slope.

pmichaud 13y ago
I'm not so sure. Europeans stopped conquering and colonizing in favor of economic colonialism, which is just as bad perhaps, but now with a veneer of credibility. They are just doing business. Nevermind that the despot du jour was installed by the CIA. Similarly we can talk about NSA overreaches all we want, as opposed to the old way of actually silencing the dissent. Great, except everyone is just talking, they are probably continuing with impunity under a different program name.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  In East Germany, this thread would likely have led to our arrest.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    In a free country on the other hands, every last (healthy adult) citizen would be able to think without employing sophistry, and to see woods despite the trees.

mtgx 13y ago

As for the "potential" chilling effect of all the spying, you don't need to theorize about whether it will happen or not. It's already happening: http://www.france24.com/en/20130619-us-seizure-journalist-records-called-chilling http://www.france24.com/en/20130619-us-seizure-journalist-re... The 4th amendment is all but obliterated, and now this is how the 1st amendment and the freedom of the press will be destroyed, too, by killing any sort of investigative journalism left, and by prosecuting all leakers. I used to think that Wikileaks and other such secure leaking is the future of investigative journalism. If you believe the print media will die, and blogging will take its place, then investigative journalism will die, too, because I doubt many bloggers will go out and do that. So in a way Wikileaks would serve as a "disruptive innovation" for investigative journalism. Actually, most investigative journalism is only about finding "sources" that are willing to leak stuff to them, anyway. Wikileaks is kind of a "user-generated" investigative journalism/leaking, or investigative journalism 2.0. But if the government is trying to kill both at once, then I'm not sure what's left to uncover illegalities inside the government.

gyardley 13y ago

Is there anything in this article, aside from an overblown metaphor in the title, that hasn't been posted here fifty times in the last couple weeks?

toddmatthews 13y ago
its written by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
- mpyne 13y ago
  So, no?
ginsong 13y ago
If Snowden has convincing evidence why is he not releasing it? I don't understand all the dancing around.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Propaganda/PR is not just a tool for the government and corporations. I have to give Snowden credit for that, at least.

squozzer 13y ago

The current uproar will do us no good unless we develop ways to either disrupt the technology or protect ourselves from it. Because even if we win this round, the state will find ways to bring these programs back in some other guise. For example, the FISA courts were part of the reforms that emerged from the abuses of the CIA and FBI during the Red Scare and Civil Rights eras. In other words, we need a technical Rosa Parks. Well, more like a million of them.

minikites 13y ago

In all the talk about this, I haven't seen any proposed solutions. What is the way out? Stop all domestic surveillance? What about US Citizens in other countries? What about foreign nationals inside the US? Increase oversight? What about for rare unambiguous national security threats? How can that be enforced? And it sounds a lot like learned helplessness, but what is an individual supposed to do?

xradionut 13y ago
Don't cause waves, pay taxes.

mholkesvik 13y ago

The NSA leak is troubling, yes. It is NOT comparable to the horrors of communist authoritarianism - where 20 million people were killed, starved, or simply disappeared. To me, this seems like a cheap shock tactic more common on stations like Fox News where the labels "nazi" or "socialist" are thrown around without thought. These words have deep historical roots and deep meaning, and to use them in situations where it isn't appropriate is trivializing. A government can be intrusive and overstep its bounds without earning the label of 'Stasi'. We can have a conversation about the power and role of government in this country without drawing these hyperbolic and historically inaccurate parallels.

microcolonel 13y ago

There is no hope if that's the extent of the “solution”, no meaningful work will come in the form of more politics and oppression. The only reasonable conclusion is that to stop the bloodshed and invasion, one must stop supporting the oppressors. You are quite literally paying many thousands of thugs to fly to the middle east and support a paedophilic, incompetent, oppressive regime which directly hurts people's lives. At home you're paying many more thousands to pick on people carrying small amounts of plant trimmings, specifically targeted by the colour of their skin. Those people are then sent to buildings and force fed in contract-incestuous CEO-laden prisons with an economic incentive to cost more money to their handlers. Aggression is the problem, and paying people to use it against you, or anyone else for that matter, is probably not going to help.