Former
Stasi Lieutenant Colonel On NSA’s Mass Surveillance
‘It Is The
Height Of Naivete To Think That Once Collected This Information Won’t
Be Used’
26
June, 2013
BERLIN
— Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV
tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East
Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the
communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic
spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile
spread across his face.
“You
know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said,
recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct
communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.
In
those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a
time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had
to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking
the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the
cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet
traffic of millions more.
“So
much information, on so many people,” he said.
East
Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police
state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so
vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were
overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop,
Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news
that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where
millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video
content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their
homes.
Even
Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the
infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering
such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious,
he said.
“It
is the height of naivete 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.”
U.S.
officials have defended the government collection of information
since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked
by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The
records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials
say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions
are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to
provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible
explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts
that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked
for that statement, and her administration appeared far less
forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled
against the British government.
Germans
are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much
information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans
turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the
setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small,
handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to
the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely
limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.
As
many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged
protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the
historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors
from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign,
“You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added
this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”
The
center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over
the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to
conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President
Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of
the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because
I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much
trust."
“Everyone
knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said
Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser.
“It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a
society destroys itself.”
For
15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and
conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi
targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000
pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United
States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.
“But
that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The
United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be
honestly addressed and fixed.”
Weisshuhn
shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s
been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic
spying, isn’t the bad guy.
"In
our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d
gathered and realized we’d been naive," Weisshuhn said. "Here,
it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of
information."
Germans,
especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments
that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track
terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks
have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t
forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague
threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came
under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United
States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of
anti-terrorism.
Dagmar
Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency,
which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on
them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.
“This
is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now
gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the
equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are
spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives,
what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is
essential.”
Still,
she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out
what was studied.
“It’s
easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state
that no longer exists,” she said.
Stefan
Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses
in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes
clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the
banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much
greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes
the effort to gather the information.
“When
the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world
I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more
than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the
water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people
today put in emails or texts to each other.
“The
lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all
of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi.
This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”
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