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To reply to myself, the thing that I took away from his telling of this experience and watching his wife almost cry when they got to the part about boarding the plane back with the children... it's this:

Every thing that you ever do is recorded somewhere. Every person has a file whether they think they do or not. This file will only ever be used against you.

And Europe remembers such a thing... it was only 1990 that the Stasi was dissolved. Yet here we are constructing an even more powerful and permanent version of "a file on everyone".

My brother's demonstration was a worker's one, not political. But don't you see that if attending a political rally risks arrest and permanent repercussions, even if you were innocent of everything save for having an opinion... then are we not already at the point in which to hold an alternate political view is to risk inserting something into your file (it exists anyway) which could permanently affect your life.

Who knows what the future holds, but for my brother it's unlikely to involve working for a company that ever expects travel to the USA. Thus, one is forced to modify their behaviour to avoid being penalised by the current system.

Isn't that what the effect of the Stasi was?

I mean, being European, I find it hard to see how history isn't repeating itself on an ever grander scale now that there are tools that allow it to do so.

I think part of the problem is we have a perverted sense of "Godwin's law", such that making allusions to the past is considered "losing the conversation". The past it seems is no longer something that we are supposed to learn from, and the notion that there may be parallels between the past and the present is now termed 'offensive'.

In a lesser forum, you would likely be dismissed out of hand for mentioning the Stasi, even though your reasons for mentioning it are very sound. How can we hope to avoid the past if we refuse to talk about it?

obviously some needed the files the instant they were up for grabs:

CIA agents acquired the records after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall

only to return them, when they became only a piece of history (I wonder about any copies)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/703303.stm

I think about this often too. I think the answer ultimately lies somewhere in the realm of "history is cyclical." A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years.

America today is an excellent example of that. The founders came from a time of tyranny and oppression, and worked hard to try to prevent that in their new country. And yet a lot of how our government today works is, I imagine, very much contrary to what the founding fathers envisioned.

You can be detained for seemingly no reason by police almost anywhere (see the ACLU's "constitution-free zone"), prisons and courts have become a means of revenge, not justice or rehabilitation, the president is increasingly seen as a king-like figure ("Something's wrong with the country? Must be the president's fault. What's he going to do to fix it?"), and--without much exaggeration--we're a small jump away from a total surveillance state, as this article emphasizes. In many ways we're already there, and that's just the stuff we know about.

In Europe, as you mentioned, the Stasi were around until just recently. There are still grandparents alive who remember what the continent went through during WW2. (My own is one of them.) European society's memory is still fresh, and they won't repeat mistakes they remember. I think that's why there are so many privacy-protecting laws enshrined in the EU.

We should pay attention to how countries recently emerging from oppression or war, like Romania, Serbia, or Bosnia, handle the internet. I'll bet they'll be the bastions of internet freedom in the coming decades.

But what of the US? Maybe we're trapped in cyclical history. Maybe in 50 years things will be bad enough for people to get up in arms, and we'll start over just like we did a few hundred years ago. Who knows.

A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years.

A few hundred years? Try a few decades.

In the 1940s, the USA fought totalitarianism. Then we had a major fight against Communism. In both struggles, a major part of our self image is that we, unlike the totalitarian states we struggled against, were a free country. If, in a movie in the 70s, you saw the German officer saying, "Papers, please", that was a sure sign that they were the enemy - not living in a free state.

Today we live in a state that would be instantly recognizable as a totalitarian state. Just like past totalitarian states, the excuse is our security. Do you think that I'm exaggerating? 20 years ago it was common to not need an ID to board a plane, with it being reasonably common that the person whose name was on the ticket was not the person holding the ticket. (That would generally be because someone had bought someone else's return ticket because that was cheaper than buying a one-way ticket.) Today you not only need ID, you go through a thorough search and most take it for granted that we might go through a virtual strip search to get onto the plane.

Can I make this worse? Actually, I can. Nobody will show you the law requiring ID to fly. There was actually a lawsuit filed about this. John Gilmore lost, and STILL didn't get to see the law. (See http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-03-... for random verification.)

A few decades is spot on. The Bush era lies/media complicity to march us into Iraq were eerily reminiscent of the Gulf of Tonkin lie LBJ used to get us into Vietnam. It was so obvious to me. One of the things that spooked me out is that anyone who challenged the prevailing push to war was marked "unpatriotic" and "unamerican". Shut up and support our troops. I thought such sentiment could never take root in a country that had even the slightest clue about 20th century totalitarian history, particularly with regard to 1930s Europe.

This. I think this form of non-judicial "punishment" and its effects in terms of people being afraid and hence modifying their behavior can be a form of censorship and political repression that is rarely discussed.

This also has a bearing on discussions whenever someone talks about freedom of expression.

> The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people within the EU would regard this as just a part of living in the civilised west.

The US is not all that different. You'd get a court order for the record to be expunged. Although each state has its own laws

In many (most? all?) states here you can have misdemeanors expunged from your record after a couple of years without incident as well.