From: sheriffcoltrane23x@gmail.com   
      
   You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi.   
      
   .   
   Click here to explore a hand-drawn graphic, made by the East German secret   
   police, that appears to show the social connections the Stasi gleaned about a   
   poet they were spying on.   
      
   by Julia Angwin   
   ProPublica, Feb. 11, 2014, 3:02 p.m.   
    Email   
   Feb. 13: This article has been corrected.   
      
      
      
      
   The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously   
   intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of   
   the population of the country during the Communist regime.   
      
   But their spycraft -- while incredibly invasive -- 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").   
      
   Gary Bruce, an associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo   
   and the author of "The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi," helped me decode   
   the graphic and other files. I was surprised at how crude the surveillance   
   was. "Their main    
   surveillance technology was mail, telephone, and informants," Bruce said.     
      
   Another file revealed a low-level surveillance operation called an IM-vorgang   
   aimed at recruiting an unnamed target to become an informant. (The names of   
   the targets were redacted; the names of the Stasi agents and informants were   
   not.) In this case, the    
   Stasi watched a rather boring high school student who lived with his mother   
   and sister in a run-of-the-mill apartment. The Stasi obtained a report on him   
   from the principal of his school and from a club where he was a member. But   
   they didn't have much on    
   him -- I've seen Facebook profiles with far more information.   
      
   A third file documented a surveillance operation known as an OPK, for   
   Operative Personenkontrolle, of a man who was writing oppositional poetry. The   
   Stasi deployed three informants against him but did not steam open his mail or   
   listen to his phone calls.    
   The regime collapsed before the Stasi could do anything further.   
      
   I also obtained a file that contained an "observation report," in which Stasi   
   agents recorded the movements of a forty-year-old man for two days --   
   September 28 and 29, 1979. They watched him as he dropped off his laundry,   
   loaded up his car with rolls of    
   wallpaper, and drove a child in a car "obeying the speed limit," stopping for   
   gas and delivering the wallpaper to an apartment building. The Stasi continued   
   to follow the car as a woman drove the child back to Berlin.   
      
   The Stasi agent appears to have started following the target at 4:15 p.m. on a   
   Friday evening. At 9:38 p.m., the target went into his apartment and turned   
   out the lights. The agent stayed all night and handed over surveillance to   
   another agent at 7:00 a.   
   m. Saturday morning. That agent appears to have followed the target until   
   10:00 p.m. From today's perspective, this seems like a lot of work for very   
   little information.   
      
   And yet, the Stasi files are an important reminder of what a repressive regime   
   can do with so little information. Here are the files:   
      
      
   Stasi File 1 Original   
   ProPublica   
      
   Stasi File 1 Translation   
   ProPublica   
      
   Stasi File 2 Original   
   ProPublica   
      
   Stasi File 2 Translation   
   ProPublica   
      
   Stasi Observation Report   
   ProPublica   
      
   Stasi Social Network Analysis   
   ProPublica   
   6 documents   
   Translations by Yvonne Zivkovic and David Burnett   
      
   Correction: An earlier version of this story said that another file revealed a   
   low-level surveillance operation called an im-forgang. In fact, the operation   
   was called an IM-vorgang. We mistakenly translated the the 'V' to an 'F'. 'IM'   
   was an acronym for    
   Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, or unofficial informant.   
      
      
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