Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1954.
It’s hard to overstate just how efficient surveillance has become in the
21st century. Critics of mass Internet surveillance like to compare the
NSA and its allied spy services to the Stasi, the secret police of the
former East Germany, who were notorious for the pervasive and
suffocating blanket of surveillance with which they smothered the
country. But the Stasi were engaged in pre-Internet surveillance, and
they were very expensive guard labor by modern standards. In 1989,
the last year of the Stasi’s operation, there were 16,111,000 people in
East Germany, and 264,096 operatives of one kind or another in the
pay of the Stasi, including 173,081 ‘‘unofficial informants’’ (snitches).
That’s a ratio of one spy to every 60 people. […] Being generous,
though, let’s say there’s 1.4 million NSA spies and associated staff,
including in the five eyes – 1.4 million people to surveil seven billion
humans, give or take a couple. That’s a spy:subject ratio of 1:5000 –
two orders of magnitude greater than the Stasi. The Stasi used an
army to surveil a nation; the NSA uses a battalion to surveil a planet.
Compared to the NSA, the Stasi were artisanal craftsmen.
Fred Friendly, onetime head of
CBS news, called for an
“electronic bill of rights.”
Twenty years after his appeal,
no such bill is in sight. On the
contrary, privacy issues seem
to have been privatized, left to
the whims of bankers,
merchandisers, and other
commercial users of the new
technology. (Barber, 1998)
Država
Privatne
kompanije
Svi ostali?
Da li je internet zaista
besplatan?
Peer-to-peer
prismotra?