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Ever since Edward Snowden handed thousands of National Security Agency documents over to filmmaker Laura Poitras and writer Glenn Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel room, the NSAs mass surveillance of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic has been widely compared to the abuses of East Germanys secret police, the Stasi.

The communist republic may have imploded in 1989, but it has nonetheless become synonymous with a smothering, all-knowing spy apparatus.

A year ago, President Obama himself cited East Germany as a cautionary tale of what could happen when vast, unchecked surveillance turned citizens into informers and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of their own homes. He was responding to accusations that just such a vast, unchecked effort to collect data has metastasized on his watch.

It was no coincidence that Poitras chose Leipzig, a city in the heart of the former East Germany, for the recent German debut of her documentary Citizenfour, about Snowden and the NSA. If the government is doing that kind of surveillance, it has a corrosive effect on democracy and society, Poitras said after the premiere. People who lived through it can tell you what it was like.

Indeed. When it was revealed that the NSA had been listening to her cell phone calls, German chancellor Angela Merkelwho came of age in communist East Germany, under the Stasis watchful eyetold President Obama, This is just like the Stasi. In an interview last year, NSA whistle-blower and Poitras source William Binney likened the agency to the Stasi on supersteroids.

Theyre wrong. In crucial ways, the two agencies are very different. In its effort to control East Germany, the Stasi made its presence felt in every sphere of life. Its power rested not only in the information its surveillance yielded but in the fear and distrust that collection instilled. The NSA, on the other hand, operates best in the dark, its targets unaware of its existence, let alone its dragnet data-gathering. Even Poitras, when asked, acknowledged a line between the two. The NSAs broad, mass collection is fundamentally different than what the Stasi did, she said in Leipzig.

Calling the Stasi secret police is misleading. The name is an abbreviation of STAatsSIcherheit, or State Security. Founded in 1950 as the East German Communist Partys sword and shield, it never hid the fact that it was spying. By the late 1980s, more than 260,000 East Germans1.6 percent of all adults in the countryworked for the organization, either as agents or as informants. (If the NSA employed as many analysts to spy on 320 million Americans, it would have 5 million people on the payroll.) It wanted you to constantly wonder which of your friends was an informant and, ideally, tempt or pressure you into the role of snitch too.

At times, the scrutiny reached absurd proportions. Every apartment building and workplace had a designated informer. Spies used specially built equipment to steam open mail; a Division of Garbage Analysis was on the lookout for suspect trash. Stasi agents let the air out of targets bicycle tires and rearranged the pictures in their apartments in an effort to drive class enemies crazy.

Cooperation was often a prerequisite for career advancement, academic success, even a new apartment. The Stasi had the power to take your children away or keep you from getting into a university. Its visibility and ubiquity forced East Germans to make moral choices every day: Collaborate with an unjust, undemocratic system or suffer the consequences.

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No, the NSA Isnt Like the StasiAnd Comparing Them Is Treacherous

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is widely believed to have mandated high-tech vendors build backdoors into their hardware and software. Reactions from foreign governments to the news are harming American businesses and, some contend, may result in the breakup of the Internet.

For example, Russia is moving to paper and typewriters in some cases to move certain types of information, Private.me COO Robert Neivert told the E-Commerce Times.

Governments are pushing to enact laws to force the localization of data -- generally meaning they won't allow data to be stored outside their borders to protect citizens against NSA-type surveillance -- a move that's of particular concern to American businesses, according to a Lawfare Research paper.

That's because they deem U.S. firms untrustworthy for having provided the NSA with access to the data of their users.

"There's an increased use of networks on behalf of Europe and other allies that do not pass through U.S. companies or U.S.-controlled networks," Neivert said. Some countries are even proposing to break up the Internet.

However, "people who say these things threaten the Internet itself are misunderstanding things," Jonathan Sander, strategy & research officer of Stealthbits Technologies, told the E-Commerce Times. "The Internet produces too much wealth for too many people and organizations for anyone, including the U.S., to threaten it."

The U.S. economy "is one of the best weapons we have in the technology war," Sander continued. The U.S. market "is too big for foreign governments to ignore," which is why foreign companies continue doing business with the U.S.

Concern has been expressed about invasions of privacy through surveillance, but this issue is "a matter of policy" and there are differences in how citizens of different countries approach it, Sander pointed out. "In the EU and, to a lesser extent [Australia and New Zealand], privacy is an issue at the ballot box so there are laws reflecting that."

In the U.S., however, privacy "has yet to seriously break through as an issue, so there has been less motion," Sander remarked.

In August of last year, the German government reportedly warned that Windows 8 could act as a Trojan when combined with version 2.0 of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a specification for a secure cryptoprocessor.

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The Fallout From the NSA's Backdoors Mandate

A federal judge on Tuesday said the National Security Agency is not obligated to confirm nor deny it has someones specific phone records, shooting down a conservative think tanks effort to try to use the spy agency to reveal secrets that other federal agencies want kept hidden.

The case served as an early test of the limits for researchers who had hoped to use the National Security Agencys phone records collection program as a treasure trove for their efforts. But Judge James A. Boasberg, sitting in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., said the NSA is within its rights to refuse to say what kinds of records it has, and unless researchers can specifically prove the agency has them, the NSA doesnt have to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Because of the potential consequences that additional disclosures could have on national security, the court will not require the agency to tip its hand any further, the judge wrote in a 24-page opinion.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which for years has been battling the EPA to try to get access to text messages sent by senior agency executives, had asked the court to force the NSA to turn over EPA phone records and email or text messages the spy agency might have scooped up in its snooping.

The CEI is trying to get a glimpse at messages it believes were sent by former Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson and current boss Gina McCarthy. The EPA has turned over thousands of text messages but has declined to turn over others, saying it doesnt believe it has them and that it doesnt think it even has a duty to preserve text messages.

CEI lawyers are fighting the EPA in another case, but after the revelations about the National Security Agencys phone-snooping program they figured they would try to see if they could get the spy agency to release the records. The NSA said it could neither confirm nor deny that it had any such records, and that launched the court case.

The CEI argued that since the NSA admitted it had scooped up phone metadata records from Verizon customers, that must include Ms. McCarthys phone and Ms. Jacksons personal email account with Verizon.

Judge Boasberg countered that the CEI was going on a fishing expedition, saying the NSA has never admitted it had Ms. McCarthys or Ms. Jacksons records specifically, nor has it even admitted it scooped up text or email data.

The judge said he wouldnt force it to do so now.

In essence, were the agency required to confirm or deny the existence of records for specific individuals, it would begin to sketch the contours of the program, including, for example, which providers turn over data and whether the data for those providers is complete, the judge wrote.

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Court rules NSA doesn't have to divulge what records it has

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