Big Brother Goes West

With all the noise and outrage over the US government’s tapping into all the major Internet companies to gather data, it was interesting to see the reaction in Germany. Yup, in Germany, not the US. And this was before they discovered that the US had spied on EU consulates!

Wolfgang Schmidt, a former lieutenant colonel in the erstwhile Stasi, spoke wistfully about the kind of surveillance the Americans got caught doing:
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true…So much information, on so many people.”
Now you might think, sure, the Internet allows for so much more data to be collected, no wonder the Stasi would have loved it. But you would only be partially correct. Because even the technology to surveil (is that even a word? But you get the meaning, right?) back then was primitive. How primitive? Well, the equipment only allowed Schmidt’s department to tap 40 phone lines at a time. If he wanted a new guy tapped, he would have to drop an existing guy! That’s how much technology has changed…

Now keep in mind that much of the data that the US collected was untargeted, i.e., they did not pick specific individuals to monitor based on prior intelligence or patterns; they just monitored everyone. This was Big Data monitoring (see my earlier blog on such super massive sample sizes and statistical analysis, When N = All).

And it’s because of their Stasi history that many Germans were outraged by what was happening in the US. Which is why, at Checkpoint Charlie (a point in the infamous Berlin Wall where people could move between East and West Berlin), right below the famous line,
“You are entering the American sector.”
A German demonstrator added :
“Your privacy ends here.”

It is so ironic that Schmidt, the former Stasi guy, should now be warning Americans that:
“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used.”
What he says is true but it is so ironic that a Stasi guy is saying this to “The Land of the Free”. Knowing Americans though, Schmidt might have done better to phrase the point in American-speak:
“Anything you say can and will be used against you.”

It's amusing that the US spies on its own citizens, the Russians let Edward Snowden stay in a Russian airport, and the Ecuadorians  are offering him asylum...it's a topsy-turvy world!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more