You Know Who Else Collected Metadata?

[Peter Lemkin]

While the STASI were perhaps the best [read worst] of the East European Communist intelligence agencies - I can confirm from my extensive work in the Czechoslovak Communist-era Secret Police [StB] Archives, that much the same went on here - if, perhaps, with a slightly lower % of the population actively followed. Czechoslovakia was #1, however, in phone taps in the world! While doing research on the secret end of WWII for a book I've been working on, I spent many hours in the archives - as the files are not allowed out. Citizens of the [now] Czech Republic would be at the tables around me and I occasionally got a glimpse of the size and nature of their [or their family's] files they were looking at. Some were laughing - others were in tears. As my own quest was on certain specific persons, I got to see in the many files I read and copied how the StB operated. Methods were, yes, primitive compared to the technology today....but very comprehensive and invasive and the StB too used to build up profiles which one could call 'metadata' - if mostly not electronic. Agents or informants following a target were to note even the number of beers the target was drinking - as well as who they spoke to and where they went, etc. Agents even noted their own beers while following [so they could be reimbursed!]. We have learned nothing from the past and are repeating the mistakes - the worst mistakes - with the 'advantages' of current technology. One of my 'targets' was a former high-level SS man who was imprisoned for a many years in Czechoslovakia and interrogated by the StB as to Nazi secrets that might be yet buried on Czechoslovak territory [much was!]; so I also got to see reports of his interrogations and what he was subjected to. He was encouraged to write mail and receive it - and every one of those communications was copied and in his files. Ah, but the NSA has computers now connected to and sucking up everything......and in their minds [sic], we are all suspect and potential evil-doers.