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Comment by gurkendoktor | Hacker News Reader

A common anecdote from East Germany is that teachers would ask children what the "sandman" looks like (an evening TV show for children). The seemingly harmless answer then revealed whether their parents secretly watched imperialist West-German television. So yeah, children are pretty good at implicating other people.

(No real source, but a random German article that quotes this anecdote: http://www.badische-zeitung.de/panorama/der-freundliche-herr...)

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More innocuous example:

I remember when being a kid in school, the police were by for a visit to educate on alcohol responsibility, and touching on ethanol/methanol dangers since moonshine was a thing, they showed a distiller (which "if clearly meant for distilling spirits" is illegal to own), and some kid blurted out "my dad has one of those!" immediately when seeing it.

The teacher tried to claim "teacher-parent confidentiality" when asked to identify the kid/parents as if that's a thing, but I don't think they took it seriously enough to warrant further action.

Nevertheless; yeah, kids say everything.

This was common in all Eastern Bloc countries. In Poland under Russian occupation UB/SB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Służba_Bezpieczeństwa "secret police responsible for internal and external intelligence and counterintelligence to fight underground movements and the influence of the Catholic Church" would send its agents to schools to befriend children and try to get them to rat on the parents.

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