“The Stasi Had a Giant Smell Register of Dissidents” | Hacker News Reader

“The Stasi Had a Giant Smell Register of Dissidents”

m.dw.com

55 pointsgaluggus10 comments

Scent sample collection by putting a dust cloth under the chair of someone who was interrogated (as it is described in the article) was shown in the German movie "The Lives of Others" [0]. Fast forward to ~4:30min if you are not interested in the rest of the film clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkRxvEjprBM (has English subtitles)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

This is a really great movie - I know it’s popular in Europe, but many Americans don’t know about it.

It’s worth watching and pretty relevant to issues today with surveillance and political risk.

It’s #57 on IMDb Top 250 (https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/). Also won the Best Foreign Language Film that year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/79th_Academy_Awards). That’s how I heard of it.

I saw it as a boy and it had a profound effect on the way I view government. Privacy feels like just a word until you see it violated like it is in this movie.

If we destroyed all the spy records of the US on its citizens (a la Snowden revelations), would anyone in the future view that as a loss?

We have a turn-key dictatorship, the key hasn’t been turned yet. A pack of bureaucrats will have to get new jobs.

Perhaps the rest of us can agree that we should tear this surveillance state apart before it is fully weaponized against us.

This was a plot point in the wonderful Oscar winning German film The Lives of Others.

Even in their wildest, most insane dreams, the Stasi couldnt possibly have imagined the scale of tracking and monitoring now practised by big tech.

What is with the sudden influx of smell-related articles on HN lately?

Not that I mind. It's a fascinating topic. But, wow.

I suspect the catalyst has been the media tour for the book, "The Joy of Sweat." It has been getting outsized press and I think a lot of knock-on related content on smell in general. But this is just wild speculation on my part.

"German police have been accused of using Stasi methods"

I'm sure the Stasi also used fingerprints, yet no-one is asking German police to give those up. Perhaps the goals, rather than methods, are what should be under greater scrutiny - going after dissidents is not a thing of the past, they're just not called such:

Germany’s existing Network Enforcement Act (aka the NetzDG law) came into force in the country in 2017, putting an obligation on social network platforms to remote hate speech within set deadlines as tight as 24 hours for easy cases — with fines of up to €50M should they fail to comply. - https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/19/germany-tightens-online-ha...

Germany's domestic intelligence agency hopes to place the entire Alternative for Germany party under surveillance. - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/monitoring-the-...

Perhaps they are referring to methods used by the stasi but not commonly used by law enforcement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com