Jasper Rietman

Ever since Edward Snowden handed thousands of National Security Agency documents over to filmmaker Laura Poitras and writer Glenn Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel room, the NSAs mass surveillance of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic has been widely compared to the abuses of East Germanys secret police, the Stasi.

The communist republic may have imploded in 1989, but it has nonetheless become synonymous with a smothering, all-knowing spy apparatus.

A year ago, President Obama himself cited East Germany as a cautionary tale of what could happen when vast, unchecked surveillance turned citizens into informers and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of their own homes. He was responding to accusations that just such a vast, unchecked effort to collect data has metastasized on his watch.

It was no coincidence that Poitras chose Leipzig, a city in the heart of the former East Germany, for the recent German debut of her documentary Citizenfour, about Snowden and the NSA. If the government is doing that kind of surveillance, it has a corrosive effect on democracy and society, Poitras said after the premiere. People who lived through it can tell you what it was like.

Indeed. When it was revealed that the NSA had been listening to her cell phone calls, German chancellor Angela Merkelwho came of age in communist East Germany, under the Stasis watchful eyetold President Obama, This is just like the Stasi. In an interview last year, NSA whistle-blower and Poitras source William Binney likened the agency to the Stasi on supersteroids.

Theyre wrong. In crucial ways, the two agencies are very different. In its effort to control East Germany, the Stasi made its presence felt in every sphere of life. Its power rested not only in the information its surveillance yielded but in the fear and distrust that collection instilled. The NSA, on the other hand, operates best in the dark, its targets unaware of its existence, let alone its dragnet data-gathering. Even Poitras, when asked, acknowledged a line between the two. The NSAs broad, mass collection is fundamentally different than what the Stasi did, she said in Leipzig.

Calling the Stasi secret police is misleading. The name is an abbreviation of STAatsSIcherheit, or State Security. Founded in 1950 as the East German Communist Partys sword and shield, it never hid the fact that it was spying. By the late 1980s, more than 260,000 East Germans1.6 percent of all adults in the countryworked for the organization, either as agents or as informants. (If the NSA employed as many analysts to spy on 320 million Americans, it would have 5 million people on the payroll.) It wanted you to constantly wonder which of your friends was an informant and, ideally, tempt or pressure you into the role of snitch too.

At times, the scrutiny reached absurd proportions. Every apartment building and workplace had a designated informer. Spies used specially built equipment to steam open mail; a Division of Garbage Analysis was on the lookout for suspect trash. Stasi agents let the air out of targets bicycle tires and rearranged the pictures in their apartments in an effort to drive class enemies crazy.

Cooperation was often a prerequisite for career advancement, academic success, even a new apartment. The Stasi had the power to take your children away or keep you from getting into a university. Its visibility and ubiquity forced East Germans to make moral choices every day: Collaborate with an unjust, undemocratic system or suffer the consequences.

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No, the NSA Isnt Like the StasiAnd Comparing Them Is Treacherous