They were East Germany’s dreaded secret police. They spied on ordinary East Germans, tapped their phones, intercepted their mail, assessed their ‘reliability’, used informants, kept dossiers on persons of interest and ordinary citizens alike. The hated Stasi fell with the Berlin Wall but they live on – in
Continue readingTag: Secret Police
The Cracked Crystal Ball II: On Mass Surveillance
The revelation this week that CSEC has the capability to monitor the movements of Canadians simply by gathering some metadata from the traffic that goes by on public networks raises a lot of interesting questions that are worth discussing. In an e-mail conversation on the matter, the following question was
Continue readingThe Cracked Crystal Ball II: Harper Now Has His Own Secret Police
A feature of totalitarian states around the world is a “secret” police force that is engaged in spying on a nation’s citizens and keeping them in line with implicit threats of “legal action”. Most notorious among these would be East Germany’s Stasi, but there are many examples. In Canada, it
Continue reading