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Over the past few months, I have often begun this column with anecdotes from movies or personal experiences, tying them to a relevant concept in tech policy. Let us take a slight detour from entertainment and personal life this month and head to East Germany.
Throughout human history, perhaps no time and place teach us more about surveillance than the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
The GDR, like a lot of countries, had a Ministry for State Security called the Stasi. The sole purpose of the Stasi was to keep the Communist Party in power, and they did so by developing a sinister surveillance apparatus.
By 1989, the Stasi had an estimated 91,000 employees and over a million informants. According to some estimates, there was a Stasi informant for every 6.5 citizens. Informants were not just limited to adults, but even school-going kids under the age of 15 would relay tidbits to the secret service.
Children would spy on their classmates or on their own families. So if you happened to pass a negative comment about the state of affairs or about the party, there was a fair chance that you would be within earshot of an informant and would be placed under suspicion, with a file under your name being updated in due course.
The Stasi kept hundreds of millions of files on citizens, in addition to over a million photographs and thousands of audio recordings.
A dangerous tool
It is remarkable how quickly this has been forgotten as a lesson in why surveillance is dangerous. Since Germany’s reunification in 1990, the archives of the Stasi were opened to the public, and over three million Germans requested to view their files. As recently as 2012, Germany introduced a law allowing Germans access to their late parents’ and grandparents’ secret service files if they suspect the Stasi had played a role in their lives.
As an institution, the Stasi taught us why surveillance, backed with little or no accountability or checks and balances, can be a dangerous tool that can impact generations. Over the past month, we have heard about Pegasus and how it was used to target individuals of interest in India and by states around the world.
From being an institutional function that the Stasi exemplified with such terror, surveillance has become a service. States and ministries do not need to hire hundreds of thousands of employees and informants to keep track of what is being said about them. Instead, tracking our digital footprints gives them access to not just what is being said, but also to what people might be thinking as they type uninhibited into their search boxes. For the lack of a better way to put it, digital surveillance seems to have all of the protein of traditional surveillance, and none of the carbs.
And the NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company that developed Pegasus, may not be a unique case. Other companies that license spyware to states or private parties may exist. And even if you can make the case that no such companies apart from the NSO group exist today, it is no guarantee that such spyware won’t be developed by companies or even countries in the future, with varying ethical standards and conflicts of interest.
All this is not to say that the recent developments should be considered normal — quite the opposite. If we normalise this today, our digital rights will have taken a hit. And the liberties we give up today will end up becoming the norm tomorrow.
The writer is a policy analyst working on emerging technologies. He tweets @thesethist
Tech-Tonic is a monthly look-in at all the happenings around the digital world, both big and small.