The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [84]
Why Databases Are Better Than Stasi Officers
Information may, indeed, be the oxygen of the modern age, as Ronald Reagan famously alleged, but it could be that peculiar type of oxygen that helps to keep dictators on life support. What reasonable dictator passes up an opportunity to learn more about his current or future enemies? Finding effective strategies to gather such information has always been a priority for authoritarian governments. Often such strategies were intrusive, such as placing bugs in dissidents’ apartments and wiretapping their phone conversations, as happened in many countries of the Soviet bloc. But sometimes governments found more creative ways to do it, especially if they were simply trying to gauge public sentiment rather than peep inside the minds of particular dissidents.
The Greek military regime, for example, tried to keep track of everyone’s reading habits by monitoring their choice of newspapers, thus quickly learning about their political leanings. The Greek generals would have loved the Internet. Today one could simply data-mine Amazon.com’s wish lists—collections of books, films, and other items—that customers freely self-disclose. In 2006 the technology consultant Tom Owad conducted a quirky experiment: In less than a day he downloaded the wish lists of 260,000 Americans, used the publicly disclosed names and some limited contact information of Amazon’s customers to find their full addresses, and then placed those with interesting book requests—like Orwell’s 1984 or the Quran—on a map of the United States.
How do other old-school surveillance tactics score in the digital age? At first glance, it may seem they don’t do so well. As a vast chunk of political communication has migrated online, there is little to be gained from bugging dissidents’ apartments. Much of the digital information is swapped in silence, punctuated, perhaps, only by keystroke sounds; even the most advanced recording equipment cannot yet decipher those. Not surprisingly, analog bugs have long been replaced by their digital equivalent, making surveillance easier and less prone to error and misinterpretation; instead of recording the sounds of keyboard strokes, the secret police can now record the keyboard strokes themselves.
The Lives of Others, a 2006 Oscar-winning German drama, with its sharp portrayal of pervasive surveillance activities of the Stasi, GDR’s secret police, helps to put things in perspective. Focusing on the meticulous work of a dedicated Stasi officer who has been assigned to snoop on the bugged apartment of a brave East German dissident, the film reveals just how costly surveillance used to be. Recording tape had to be bought, stored, and processed; bugs had to be installed one by one; Stasi officers had to spend days and nights on end glued to their headphones, waiting for their subjects to launch into an antigovernment tirade or inadvertently disclose other members of their network. And this line of work also took a heavy psychological toll on its practitioners: the Stasi anti-hero of the film, living alone and given to bouts of depression, patronizes prostitutes—apparently at the expense of his understanding employer.
As the Soviet Union began crumbling, a high-ranking KGB officer came forward with a detailed description of how much effort it took to bug an apartment:
Three teams are usually required for that purpose: One team monitors the place where that citizen