You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi. - ProPublica
▻http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-stasi-spied-on-social-networks
The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. (...) [but it] was also technologically primitive by today’s standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed.
The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an “aunt,” “Operational Case Jentzsch,” presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German poet who defected to the West in 1976), places (“church”), and meetings (“by post, by phone, meeting in Hungary”).
#metadata #surveillance #stasi #NSA