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

[quakerboy]

62. Actually, Im not comparing anything except those two numbers, which I found coincidentally similar

If you want to compare directly, the NSA is only one small part of the US intelligence gathering machine. Add the various other intelligence acronyms and law enforcement agencies, and while the % of people involved may be lower, the actual intelligence gathering ability is obviously far greater. You dont need to hire 1 in 7 people if you can easily listen to every phone conversation and read every email and web search that anyone anywhere does, at any time. You have essentially turned anyone who doesn't use an encrypted service into an unpaid, unwitting informant.

As to the other.. We aren't in soviet East Germany at this time. We just aren't. Very few people are dissapeared in the middle of the night. Few are killed.

That said, it sure looks to me like we are headed in that direction, and opening doors that will allow that sort of thing to increase in the future. We do have an admitted history of using these types of intelligence gathering tools against political enemies (MLK through OWS, its public record). We do have a known instances of jailing people for political reasons(Siegalman, among others). We have war crimes at the orders of our political leaders, gone unpunished. We have a law enforcement community that is going further and further to intimidate the populace, with less and less justification, and as far as I can tell, less and less consequences.

So, no we are not in Germany, under the Stazi. But we do have things that point at the potential to get to a similar state. And every door that we open in that direction is disturbing to some of us, as is every person who "pshaws" at the idea that we could ever get there. That potential is present in every government. Every one of them can get there if things go wrong. And it looks like things are going wrong.