![]() ![]() At the turn of the millennium, new technologies, including the Internet and the cell phone, promised to empower citizens, allowing individuals greater access to information and the possibility to make new connections and build new communities.īut this wishful vision of a more democratic future proved naive. Global norms about what constituted a legitimate regime had shifted. In the wake of the apparent triumph of liberal democracy after the Cold War, police states of this kind no longer seemed viable. For decades, the Stasi was a model for how a highly capable authoritarian regime could use repression to maintain control. Officers were even positioned at post offices to open letters and packages entering from or heading to noncommunist countries. ![]() Thousands of agents worked to tap telephones, infiltrate underground political movements, and report on personal and familial relationships. Its sheer manpower and resources allowed it to permeate society and keep tabs on virtually every aspect of the lives of East German citizens. By 1989, it had almost 100,000 regular employees and, according to some accounts, between 500,000 and two million informants in a country with a population of about 16 million. It was infamous for its capacity to monitor individuals and control information flows. The Stasi, East Germany’s state security service, may have been one of the most pervasive secret police agencies that ever existed. ![]()
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