After a recent visit to Berlin, I picked up a copy of Stasiland by Anna Funder as a way of understanding the places I had just visited, and because understanding the Stasi may be a guide to thinking about the possible scenarios that could unfold over time as a result of domestic telecommunications surveillance in the United States. Funder travels through East Germany and interviews people who were part of the Stasi or who were victims of the GDR regime.

There were a few key themes that emerge from the book that are worth considering.

Partisans are dangerous. One of the people Funder interviews is the a former propagandist for the GDR regime, who still clung to his views about communism after the fall of the wall. His rationalizations were immediately familiar to me. I see them every day in Facebook memes and political oped pieces in newspapers.

The partisan starts with his conclusion, and weaves together a narrative by emphasizing facts that support the desired conclusion and ignoring or minimizing facts that complicate it. The worst part about partisans is that they are rarely self-aware of the abuse they are doing to the truth in weaving those narratives. They have a total emotional commitment to the conclusion they want to reach and they see the facts as just supporting structures that reenforce their position.

Its very easy for a person like this to see opposing points of view as epitomizing evil - literally a threat to everything that is good and decent. This is what happened in the GDR. Communist partisans were put in power by the Russians. They truly believed a warped version of reality - that people with other points of view were dangerous and evil. Those points of view were not suppressed directly - the GDR had multiple political parties and elections - they were subverted covertly. Networks of powerful people worked together to create bad consequences for those who stepped out of line or who held the wrong views. People were denied career opportunities or were more likely to find themselves in prison if they weren't of the right mind.

Some of this happens in America today. Partisans who own businesses hire likeminded employees. Various voter suppression efforts are engaged in - pamphlets giving the wrong election day are distributed in neighborhoods with particular political persuasions, the allocation of voting machines to different communities and the drawing of electoral districts biases results in favor of particular interests.

One difference is that in the GDR the state security establishment was responsible for pursuing this domestically through the use of surveillance and lots of funding was provided in order to enable it. In America we have many different kinds of partisans and control of the government is mixed between them and shifts back and forth. This prevents a significant effort by one faction to use the security apparatus of the state of maintain their power. However, it seems this was going on in the late 1960's at least.

Surveillance is a powerful tool for political repression. Through out the stories that Anna Funder relates, one can see the way that the state intelligence agency was able to use surveillance to control people. Aware of their private thoughts and dealings, the state was able to blackmail innocent people into compliance. If you did anything untoward, the state could use its knowledge of that to get you to do it's bidding. This is the danger associated with surveillance, that the dataset becomes a tool that could be used to exert quiet pressure on individual people. When this is done systematically, it becomes totalitarian.

Government agents will overstep their official authority. In Funder's stories there are numerous examples of situations where intel agents were caught doing something they weren't supposed to do, and they took steps to cover things up. You cover things up because there are potential consequences associated with getting caught. In other words, much of the worst of what was going on wasn't officially sanctioned or legal. In fact, it seems there were no consequences for people who were blackmailed by the state and refused to go along with it. Many of the threats were empty - the agents didn't actually have the power to follow through on the threats they were making.

In other words, the systematic use of surveillance to control people in the GDR state operated largely outside of the law - the surveillance itself was legal and funded, but the way that it was used was something that oversight bodies, such as they were, turned a blind eye to, because it was ultimately in their interest even though they couldn't officially sanction it in a credible way. If some abuse of power came to light, of course, the official authorities would have to take action.

In this lies the inherent danger associated with domestic surveillance in the United States. The intel agencies have the data. They can use the data illegally or in ways that are not officially sanctioned. No part of the oversight mechanism could detect that. The Congressional oversight committees and the FISA court only hear what intel agencies choose to tell them. The data is an incredibly powerful tool for political repression. The only thing that prevents it from being used for that purpose is a lack of motivation on the part of the intel agencies themselves.

Don't be useful. Don't be threatening. One person in Stasiland managed to escape being forced to spy for the state by publicly professing that the state was trying to get her to do it. They didn't retaliate - they left her alone. Perhaps they might have retaliated covertly - marked her as an enemy of the state - but at that point she was no longer useful to them, and in time, perhaps, they'd cease to focus their attention on her because they were more focused on people who did serve their interests in some way. It is likely that the people who's lives were obstructed through covert action were seen as an overt threat moreso than as a potential asset that simply refused to comply and then went on with their life.

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall: Anna Funder