Former Stasi Reaction to NSA “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true”

[Just Saying]

47. First off, you're comparing how we are dealing with prisoners of war

With how Stasi dealt with their own citizens. I'm not going to defend waterboarding as I feel it's unacceptable that we ignore the Geneva Convention but that's apples and oranges.

I highly doubt anyone living in East Germany during the Cold War would agree with your assessment of their secret police as "gentle." Nor did they voluntarily give it up as you claim. I think a lack of knowledge about the Stasi is why some people find it so easy to equate it to our current NSA scandal. I posted a couple of links about them already on this thread. Please feel free to find out how they maintained power.

I think the reality of life under the Stasi is so far removed from American life, that most people can't get their minds around just how bad it was.

Here's another interesting and informative article:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi?currentPage=all

Unlike the prison camps of the Gestapo or the summary executions of the Soviet Union's KGB, the Stasi strove for subtlety. "They offered incentives, made it clear people should cooperate, recruited informal helpers to infiltrate the entire society," says Konrad Jarausch, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They beat people up less often, sure, but they psychologically trampled people. Which is worse depends on what you prefer."
That finesse helped the Stasi quell dissent, but it also fostered a pervasive and justified paranoia. And it generated an almost inconceivable amount of paper, enough to fill more than 100 miles of shelves. The agency indexed and cross-referenced 5.6 million names in its central card catalog alone. Hundreds of thousands of "unofficial employees" snitched on friends, coworkers, and their own spouses, sometimes because they'd been extorted and sometimes in exchange for money, promotions, or permission to travel abroad.