In communist East Germany, whose official name was German Democratic Republic, “a secret police force spread throughout a society”. America is building its American Stasi openly. Some parts of its operations will be open, and critical parts will be secret. Many Americans will support it. No matter whether the American Stasi is open or secret, each isolated American will face a powerful foe, even more powerful than the Stasi, in a one-sided contest whose outcome is predetermined.
The GDR had 16.7 million people. The Stasi had thousands of spies and an estimated 100,000 unofficial collaborators. That’s the equivalent of 2 million in America. They can be found. They will come out of the woodwork like cockroaches.
The captured Stasi files on East Germans are 65 miles long, excluding 16,000 sacks of shredded documents that are being reconstructed. The American Stasi’s files will be, for all practical purposes, infinite, because of the advances in technology and information storage. The facility being built at Bluffdale, Utah is designed to hold inconceivably large amounts of data. See here and here. For a government denial, see here.
No matter what the government’s current powers of data examination may be, they are growing. They can easily take quantum leaps when a terrorist incident occurs or is staged. We still have McCain-type people saying things like this: “Every one of our intelligence leaders, both in this and previous administrations, view it [warrantless surveillance] as a vital element. We still have an enemy out there that’s plotting to attack America.” Why should we heed “our intelligence leaders”? They are biased! Naturally, they always want more surveillance, regardless of the impact on us and our society. Their single-minded focus, which in any event is hugely exaggerated, on vague enemies out there plotting to attack America has to lead to outlandish proposals to spy on every American. What good is “saving” America by creating an American Stasi that destroys American life and turns the country into a police state?
Unlimited surveillance and creation of files on millions of Americans is a huge threat to American society. It teeters right on the edge of an incredibly oppressive police state because of the power of such information. The problems are manifold with such unlimited spying.
In East Germany, the result of it was that the Stasi exercised arbitrary control of people based on all sorts of petty, erroneous, spiteful, secret, evil, and uncontrolled grounds. The people under the Stasi’s control did not and could not control what went into the files. They couldn’t fight against their use. They didn’t even know what was in them. They could be arrested and whisked away at any time without any idea why or for what. “…children were removed by the Stasi from parents deemed politically unreliable.” “People informed for personal gain, out of loyalty to the East German regime, or simply because they wanted to feel like they had some power.” “It’s terrible, it makes you despair at the malicious lies people would tell, and at the weakness of human nature.” “A West German pudding. That was all it took. Once the Stasi found out about it, a family breadwinner was fired from his army job and an East German household was plunged into destitution.”
The American Stasi will develop its own malicious momentum. It already has. The War on Drugs has imprisoned a million people due already to an American police state variant. What’s to stop the various American governments from continuing the War on Terror momentum that is generating the largest and most thorough spying effort in history? All it takes is 15 years to indoctrinate a new generation into accepting airport searches and worse as normal and necessary.
10:23 am on December 17, 2012
