The Stasi Museum in Berlin is a monument to the ultimate surveillance society. It is housed in the old Stasi headquarters. The Stasi were the state police of communist East Germany whose job was to spy on the population. On display is every type of spy gadget imaginable for a pre-Internet era. One in six East Germans were either full-time spies or informers for the Stasi, watching their neighbors. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and East Germany collapsed, East Germans looked
forward to living in freedom. But now, some are beginning to wonder just how free the new Germany is. Last year a married couple was convicted for creating a Facebook group that criticized the government’s open-door migration policy. At the trial, the man complained that Germans cannot be critical of refugees without getting labeled ‘Nazi.’ And 60 others accused of writing so-called hate speech online had their homes raided by police. READ MORE
