Comment by echelon_musk
12 hours ago
There was a CCC talk on the practices of the Stasi some years ago (I forget exactly which year).
What stayed with me from the talk was that they had shown recovered Stasi photos of a young man's home where he had a wall dedicated to American iconography.
The speaker stated that in the current era this would just be trivially collected from social media instead of needing to gain physical access to property.
Edit: It was 32C3 What Does Big Brother See While He Is Watching at appx the 40m mark.
Thanks for the pointer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS2oAOieECk
> Over the course of three years, I was able to research the archives left by East Germany's Stasi to look for visual memories of this notorious surveillance system and more recently I was invited to spend some weeks looking at the archive by the Czechoslovak StB. Illustrating with images I have found during my research, I would like to address the question why this material is still relevant – even 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The birthday party with Stasi members dressed up as the individuals they spy on is really brutal, the costumes themselves were likely confiscated from their victims. Stereotypically confirming that "German sense of humor is not a laughing matter". There is always a brutally cynical undertone in their jokes.
Are you just taking internal jokes of a repressive regime as representative for a country?
2 replies →