Word: stasis
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...Germany has tough privacy laws, a response to the state surveillance systems that were put in place first by the Nazis and then by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Under the German constitution, the state now has a special responsibility to protect the privacy of its citizens. Germans' privacy rights have been strengthened even further by some recent high-profile court rulings. In March, for example, the constitutional court overturned a law that allowed authorities to keep data on phone calls and e-mails for six months to help fight terrorism and crime. The court said the storage...
...D.D.R. was quite another. For this reason, even those with a highly developed sense of Ostalgie will probably, in the end, spend November in a forward-looking frame of mind. Visit, too, the Gedenkstätte in Dresden, www.bautzner-strasse-dresden.de, the still forbidding former city headquarters of the Stasi, the D.D.R.'s pervasive ministry of state security. Or take a look at Leipzig's Museum Runde Ecke, www. runde-ecke-leipzig.de, another Stasi base that is now an authentically preserved museum filled with examples of how East German society was controlled. They are enough to cure any misplaced notion of the D.D.R...
...There used to be a blank space on maps of East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers. Those who fell foul of the system paid a heavy price. "This is not a museum," insists Cliewe Juritza as he leads a group through the former prison. "If you visit a Baroque palace, you ponder on times that are closed. These times are not closed...
...Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian at the government agency that maintains the Stasi files today, was a teenager in 1988 and worked as a doorman in East Berlin. He was also a die-hard Pink Floyd fan and determined to get close enough to the Wall to hear the concert. He wound his way through backstreets to a building near the Wall and climbed onto the roof from a window in the building's attic. Yet despite his efforts, he could hardly hear a thing. (See pictures of people around the world mourning Michael Jackson...
...impossible to say whether the Stasi's fears of Michael Jackson were justified. But two decades later, Checkpoint Charlie is a museum, the Wall all but gone, and Berlin Mitte, the city center, has been returned to shopkeepers, restaurants and offices. Maybe the power of pop had something to do with...