Hacker News Reader

Comment by rickmb | Hacker News Reader

Opposed for historical reasons?

The fact is that the citizens of Germany, and most other Western nations formerly known as the "free world" are today under more intense surveillance than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of. The German public in general is just mildly less apathetic about this as the rest of us.

The only thing that makes a real difference in Germany is the constitutional court, that appears to suffer less from political influences than the highest courts in most other nations, and actually takes its task of protecting citizens constitutional rights very seriously.

View on HN

> [western world citizens] are today under more intense surveillance than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of [...]

I keep hearing that, and I'm sorry, but it's pure sensationalist bullshit.

At the end, the Stasi employed one secret informer per ~90 citizens (!), and one official employee per ~180 citizens. That was the (proportionally) biggest secret service that ever existed. The Stasi kept tabs on more or less anything happening in the Eastern German society, down to what individual people had for lunch, and had infiltrated every organisation within its reach.

I can understand disagreement with things like this Bundestrojaner. But spouting ridiculous, sensationalist comparisons like these only harms a legitimate issue by painting its adherents as raving zealots.

I think part of this is because nowadays it requires far fewer people to keep track of the population than it did back then.

Just mining Facebook and twitter will tell you what lots of people had for lunch...

Advertising companies know everything you do online. They have "behavioral profiles" far more detailed than anything the Stasi had. We are in fact under much more surveillance, but the problem is not the government.

Oh please, the advertising profiles I've seen are only a half-notch above pure entropy. They're about as accurate as the kind of rubbish you see from sentiment analysis on tweets.

I think there's a large difference between political and business surveillance. The Stasi were used to monitor and control political thought, whereas Facebook just wants to make money off of me. What scares me is that a malevolent government could use their privately collected information in service of political suppression; they already do it for law enforcement and military purposes.

I don't fully agree with you about the political influences, at least not in Europe. Most of the high constitutional courts tends to side with privacy and protection of it and of the citizens most of the time (at least in several cases I've seen in Spain, France, Netherlands and Germany). The big issue is that nowadays our government are much better at hiding how much spying they do; most of the crazy abuses are never ever challenged in court because nobody ever bother or notice.

Especially with the relatively good European laws on the matter, most of stuff like this would lose in court but it never gets to that point because 1 - a lot of people don't want to spend the time and effort to push it to that point, 2 - with modern spying being so well hidden, people don't even notice their rights are being abused, so what would they sue for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com