The US govt today has more information on the average American than the Stasi had on East Germans...

We've written plenty about how the US government has been quite aggressive in spying on Americans. It has been helped along by a court system that doesn't seem particularly concerned about the 4th Amendment and by the growing ability of private companies to have our data and to then share it with the government at will. Either way, in a radio interview, Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin (who's been one of the best at covering the surveillance state in the US) made a simple observation that puts much of this into context: the US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans. And, of course, as we've already seen, much of that data seems to be collected illegally with little oversight... and with absolutely no security benefit.

 To be fair, part of the reason for why this is happening is purely technical/practical. While the Stasi likely wanted more info and would have loved to have been able to tap into a digitally connected world like we have today, that just wasn't possible. The fact that we have so much data about us in connected computers makes it an entirely different world. So, from a practical level, there's a big difference. Full story...

Related posts:

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2. X-Ray body-scanning vans raise major privacy concerns...
3. The new totalitarianism of surveillance technology...
4. US drone spies: if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear,right?
5. Big 'black box' brother to spy on UK mail, phones, social networks...
6. The rise of the global police state...
7. Cell-phones are the new bat signals...
8. Bigger Brother: Total surveillance comes to UK...
9. TSA will be tracking all "daily travels to work, grocery stores and social events..."