[Business Insider]
The National Security Agency's domestic surveillance capabilities would
have been "a dream come true" for East Germany, a former lieutenant
colonel in the defunct communist country's secret police told Matthew Schofield of McClatchy.
The Stasi was one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world.
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal called them "worse than the Gestapo," referring to the secret police of Nazi Germany.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” Wolfgang Schmidt said. “So much information, on so many people.”
The comments echo those made by NSA whistleblower William Binney, who told documentarian Laura Poitras
that the danger of the NSA's domestic dragnet is that "we fall into a
totalitarian state. This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo
would have loved to have had."
