The most effective surveillance organization the world has ever known was probably the Stasi—the East German Secret Police of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), that existed from the end of World War II until 1989. They kept voluminous records on millions of people. As detailed in my suspense novel, East of the Wall, the Stasi had informers located everywhere: apartment buildings, schools and businesses—who fed them information. They were also able to place bugs in people’s apartments without the occupants knowing it.
The records included the usual information we have come to expect the government to have, including birth date, parents, education, address, military experience, job (the GDR always claimed one-hundred percent employment), marriage, children, and more. If you had a lover, if you adjusted your television antenna so that you could receive programs from West Berlin, if you read subversive books or magazines, if you belonged to an organization that didn’t like the government—sooner or later this would go into your Stasi file.
The Stasi used psychological terror and force to control the people they didn’t like: letting the air out of their bicycle tires at night, moving things around in their apartments when they weren’t home, blackmail, and, of course, prison. Occasionally, they would expel a person from the GDR, although it was very difficult for the average person to leave.
The collection and storage methods they used: typed and hand-written folders and notebooks crammed with information and photos, were primitive compared with today’s computerized technology. Which ultimately makes today’s governments, including the United States, scarier. The U.S. government wants to keep all kinds of information on you without ever bothering to show a good reason why it should. Without getting a court order.
Government wants to be able to pick you out of a crowd with facial recognition. It wants to be able to get all the information out of your cellphone, and be able to crack any encryption to do it. It wants to know everywhere you go, everything you do. It wants to do this whether or not you are a criminal. Whether or not there is just cause for it to do this. Just because. Just because it wants to have complete control over you.
High-tech companies who can supply the technology to do these things have shown some reluctance to give the government everything it wants—but will this continue? Will we become a nation of sheep under the control of an authoritarian government? Time will tell.
I seem to recall that J Edgar Hoover remained in his high position as director of the FBI so long because he had dossiers on almost everyone of any importance to him.
Ron