"This topic touches on historical sensitivities here. Our grandparents’ generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany’s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism. Germans who were born east of the Berlin Wall were careful to give the organs of the Staatssicherheit a wide berth. But it was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when the citizens who had brought down their government stormed the secret police’s headquarters and realised the full horror of the web woven by the Stasi: neighbours spying on neighbours; husbands spying on wives. Joachim Gauck, our current president, was the first head of the Stasi Archives, the government agency that, 20 years on, continues to painstakingly piece together a full record of East Germany’s surveillance of its citizens. Yes, we Germans have better cause than many of our allies to abhor the secret state. It’s why we don’t like closed-circuit television cameras. It’s also why our constitutional court enshrined a fundamental right of data privacy, and declared it illegal for Germany to implement an EU directive on preventive data storage."
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 11:45:00 +0000
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