Even former East German Stasi officials are greatly disturbed by the revelations of the NSA spying scandal. Wolfgang Schmidt, a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi, observed: “It is the height of naiveté to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

The Best of Charles Burris