The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [85]
Given such elaborate preparations, the secret police had to discriminate and go only for well-known high-priority targets. The KGB may have been the most important institution of the Soviet regime, but its resources were still finite; they simply could not afford to bug everyone who looked suspicious. Despite such tremendous efforts, surveillance did not always work as planned. Even the toughest security officers—like the protagonist of the German film—had their soft spots and often developed feelings of empathy for those under surveillance, sometimes going so far as to tip them off about upcoming searches and arrests. The human factor could thus ruin months of diligent surveillance work.
The shift of communications into the digital realm solves many of the problems that plagued surveillance in the analog age. Digital surveillance is much cheaper: Storage space is infinite, equipment retails for next to nothing, and digital technology allows doing more with less. Moreover, there is no need to read every single word in an email to identify its most interesting parts; one can simply search for certain keywords—“democracy,” “opposition,” “human rights,” or simply the names of the country’s opposition leaders—and focus only on particular segments of the conversation. Digital bugs are also easier to conceal. While seasoned dissidents knew they constantly had to search their own apartments looking for the bug or, failing that, at least tighten their lips, knowing that the secret police was listening, this is rarely an option with digital surveillance. How do you know that someone else is reading your email?
To its credit, a few weeks after Google discovered that someone was trying to break into the email accounts of Chinese human rights dissidents, it began alerting users if someone else was also accessing their account from a different computer at that time. Few other email providers followed Google’s lead—it would be seen as yet another unjustified expense—so this incident hardly put an end to the practice of secret police reading dissidents’ email.
More important, the Internet has helped to tame the human factor, as partial exposure, based on snippets and keywords of highlighted text, makes it less likely for police officers to develop strong emotional bonding with their subjects. The larger-than-life personalities of fearless dissidents that melted the icy heart of the Stasi officer in The Lives of Others are barely visible to the Internet police, who see the subjects of surveillance reduced to one-dimensional, boring database entries. The old means of doing surveillance usually began with a target and only then searched for the crimes one could ascribe to it. Today, the situation is the reverse: Crimes—antigovernment slogans or suspicious connections to the West—are detected first, and their perpetrators are located later. It’s hard to imagine Iranian Internet police developing sympathy for the people they investigate based on snippets of texts detected by the system, for they already know of their guilt and can always dig up more textual evidence if needed.
That technology helps to eliminate the indecision and frailty (and, more often than not, common sense and humanity) associated with human decision makers was not lost on the Nazis. Testifying at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Albert Speer, who served as Hitler’s chief architect and later as the minister of armaments and war production, said that “earlier dictators during their work of leadership