The Lives of Others
Das Leben der Anderen
2006 · Film · 137 min
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
In 1984 East Berlin, dedicated Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler begins spying on a famous playwright and his actress-lover Christa-Maria. Wiesler becomes unexpectedly sympathetic to the couple, and faces conflicting loyalties when his superior takes a liking to Christa-Maria.
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The Lives of Others is a seriously underrated movie. I highly suggest watching it.
It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter.
We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].
It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfeit_Deterrence_System
Here's a random movie recommendation that has nothing at all to do with the above comment or the original link posted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094
Then maybe Boîte Noire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_(2021_film)
or
Das Leben der Anderen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
I can't think of many contemporary American films that exactly fit the bill (which I interpret as: enthralling, everyday dialogue, without a pop singer's voice on the soundtrack competing for attention, or production like a music video).
Maybe Gone Girl, or Marriage Story, or something.
The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.
Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very much a price they were willing to pay.
> I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences.
The film The Lives of Others should give folks a pretty good idea of what the Stasi was.
i.e. The movie "The lives of others." :|
Totally unrelated movie tip:
The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen) has 8.4 on IMDB.
re: the extensive surveillance network of the stasi...
In case you missed it, check out the movie _The Lives of Others_.
‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).
US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.
"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation
"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege
"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film)
"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye
If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.
see also, "The Lives of Others" film, set in East Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Whoever is in power atm ;)
Also, searching homes is a last resort, and having your home searched also hurts the dignity of a person.
https://se-legal.de/criminal-defense-lawyer/house-searches-seizure-in-german-criminal-law/?lang=en
https://winheller.com/blog/en/unlawful-house-search-germany/
Also Hate-Aid is exactly the state sponsored organization who collect "Hate-Speech" that is below law-action, and certifies "trusted-flaggers" in social media.
https://hateaid.org/trusted-flagger/
BTW one of the very few good german movies on netflix:
The Lives of Others
Eh, they've already seen that with the balkans and eastern bloc countries in the 80-90s. You're gonna get a bunch of Orbàn-like small time dictators on every state that once on a while have to bow to the requests of a central-government more interested in its own political intrigues than governing anything.
US Doomers are expecting something similar to the Civil War movie in the next few years, the reality will be more similar to "The Lives Of Others".
This was a plot point in the oscar-winning movie "Das Leben der Anderen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great read on that subject. (It's very long, but the abridged versions are fine as long as you get a good translation). Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny is also great - a biography from a series of post-war interviews with the commandant at Treblinka concentration camp, who wasn't any evil genius, just someone who didn't have any particularly strong moral feelings and went with the zeitgeist. The Lives Of Others is a great film about the Stasi in East Germany too.
>Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Nah, this stuff has been going on forever. See the death of Socrates for example for 'corrupting the youth of Athens' by his speech. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates)
Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples.
The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.
No worries. I'm actually not a huge fan of art films, which might explain my confusion. I tend to like traditional dramas about believable characters and situations, and I just thought of The Lives of Others as that sort of thing, aside from it being German language. But every year, fewer dramas like that come out, so I am probably showing my age.
Craig Mazin who developed Chernobyl is also the showrunner for The Last of Us - season 2 is out next year. He'd be perfect for an East Germany based spy series with a tone similar to Chernobyl combined with The Lives of Others
imo this is largely because of the incentives around the game of school and testing.
If you must wait 20yrs before you can do interesting stuff and you’re evaluated primarily on your ability to maximize your grade then anything that gets in the way of that is an annoying distraction for most at best.
Even if you’re a student predisposed to find applications and the narrative of the discovery interesting you still have to focus on guessing what the test questions will be and just doing those, spending mental cycles on other stuff is a “waste” in that environment.
Once you’re finally free of school only then can you actually learn based on where your curiosity takes you, though at that point most choose not to - the curiosity having been driven out of them.
Makes me think a little bit about the movie the lives of others:
> “Did you know that there are just five types of artists Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a "hysterical anthropocentrist." Can't bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them. Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later. After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won't cause us any more trouble.
“Know what the best part is? Most type 4s we've processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present.”
"The Lives of Others" is a great movie about this. Apparently they used authentic early-80's-era spying gear in that movie.
"The Lives of Others" is an interesting German film about several aspects of East German society before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The plot line involves a writer who exposes the hidden suicide epidemic (which we can interpret as a signal of the failure of the communist authoritarian system), and is targeted by the STASI in response.
The author of this piece is writing something similar, but doesn't really grasp what aspects of the American system created the economic dystopia of 'flyover country' - but it began in the late 1970s, expanded through the 1980s, hit its stride in the 1990s and achieved total dominion in the 2000's, and it's called neoliberal economic policy - i.e. the elimination of nation-state controls on capital flows, the removal of well-paid manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China, Indonesia, India, the import of cheap labor to fill jobs in agriculture and construction that couldn't be outsourced (using tactics like dumping US agribusiness output in Mexico to drive small farmers into poverty).
I mean, there's a reason we have something called 'The Rust Belt' stretching across mid-America, there's a reason the streets are filled with homeless encampments, and it's not because of moral breakdown or class-vs-identity politics, it's because of the trade and economic policies implemented by financial oligarchs and their paid-off politicians.
Off topic, but "The Lives of Others" (a movie about a Stasi officer) is one of my favourite movies.
How does one obtain a realistic and reliable measure of the 'happiness index' for any particular country? I imagine this is something that's subject to massive propaganda efforts (for example, East Germany attempted to keep its suicide rate hidden from view, at least according to the movie 'The Lives of Others').
This is why I despise movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible and love the movie The Lives of Others. James Bond would be the worst spy ever and is unlike any spy I know. Why should we glamourize those who spy on us?
"Secret listening machines everywhere" was a pretty big thing in East Germany. It's also the central theme of the movie The Lives of Others.
Of course, the ability to scale this more cheaply (throwing more compute at it, instead of more people) is somewhat scary, but it's not really introducing a new capability. Especially since you still have to do something with the transcript. An AirBnB landlord who reads the transcript of what you said could as well have listened to the recording.
I mean, intercepting private business communications about say, factory openings or closings, would put the people with that information in a position to make large amounts of money by buying or selling property in those areas. There are dozens of similar examples that don't require much imagination to envisage. Blackmail material on politicians, insider knowledge on energy transactions and plans, advance warning on populist protests against EU policies, etc.
Just look at the history of any mass surveillance state to see how that works out in practice. The East German STASI is a relevant example, and there are others one could think of as well. Recommended watching: "The Lives of Others".
For an amazing movie (not documentary) about the Stasi, watch "The Lives of Others". It is chilling because you see this institution and how it effects people through the eyes of one of the people responsible for doing the spying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
I share the same experience of preferring subtitles over dubs, coming from an English country. This is most popular with Japanese media like anime (like movies like 'Your Name'/'Kimi no wa na' or Attack on Titan). It also fits for foreign language films (e.g. preferring the original German for The Lives of Others/Wings of Desire).
Crucially, outside of preference, subtitles are occasionally necessary for translating text on the screen (e.g. on building signs, newspaper front pages, posters, chalkboard writing), as information is conveyed solely through writing without spoken dialogue.
For example, consider the chalkboard scene in "Komi san can't communicate": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM . It's key to the story that a character has trouble communicating verbally, so subtitles are essential to understand the written communication on the chalkboard. (You can then compare to a more extensively subtitled version that translates all the text on the board; good subtitles make a difference to storytelling: https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboard_scene_komi_cant_communicate/).
> Secondly, I'm not convinced that mass surveillance is entirely ineffective. Wholly I agree that it's illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, overwrought, wicked expensive, and overreaching. But in our reform efforts, I want an account of how our intelligence services performed. I simply cannot believe that there haven't been many more attempted terrorist attacks.
When the US government takes away its citizens' rights (of which privacy is one), the onus is on the government to justify this action. We cannot just assume surveillance works, the government has to prove it--show us the examples. Luckily we know just how effective these programs are and, as the authors here correctly point out, the answer is "not much." [1]
From the link in the article, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded in 2014,
> Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack. [1]
[1] https://documents.pclob.gov/prod/Documents/OversightReport/ec542143-1079-424a-84b3-acc354698560/215-Report_on_the_Telephone_Records_Program.pdf
EDIT: As to the question of 'what's at stake with privacy rights?', there are great films [2], talks [3], and reading [4] on what's at stake with privacy.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
[4] https://bookshop.org/books/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-the-fight-for-a-human-future-at-the-new-frontier-of-power/
Highest recommendation for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film The Lives of Others (2006) ;)
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 was a plot point in the wonderful Oscar winning German film The Lives of Others.
At their root core, sure we could generalize that. But I would say like any art, the expression of the story is what matters. I have a hard time connecting films like The Lives of Others, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Les Innocentes, Star Wars, and Austin Powers as "just the same story." In essence all films are either a comedy or tragedy if you really want to get down to it.
The painstaking process to put back together shredded Stasi documents is mentioned at the end of The Lives of Others: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
Great movie, by the way.
Ok, here are some good German movies just from the top of my head:
- The Lives of Others
- The Tin Drum
- Goodbye Lenin!
- Downfall
- The Edukators
- Berlin Calling
- Benny’s Video
I just looked it up. It appears the "stop people from playing cop" was my interpretation.
It is all about privacy.
Germany has very strict privacy laws. Probably because of our recent history in East Germany and the Stasi who systematic monitored the people. Similar to the NSA, but the state collapsed and people could read their own record. And a bit more "personal" because people where extorted to spy on their own friends and family. Movie suggestion: "Das Leben der Anderen" / "the lives of others"
You also can't film / take photo of people in public or put a camera in front of your house if it has view of the public street.
I find it interesting how I got down voted for pointing out the same thing as you basically (just you did it with regards to China's report your neighbor program, while I pointed towards East Germany's report your neighbor and family program).
Now I totally get why I was down voted because obviously what East Germany and by extension the Russians did there was obviously bad and the UK has legitimate reasons and no ill intentions. After all its terrorism, right?
But look at it from a different perspective and it quickly becomes quite different. The East German state actors would have seen themselves exactly as the UK does now, completely in the right because they definitely are trying to find terrorists that are trying to undermine the East German state.
From there on it's a slippery slope and no doubts that the two are quite different cases in the end. But there's way too many parallels and if you want to tell me that there's not way too much potential for abuse, be my guest.
In case it was for lack of references here you go everyone: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Unlike China where this is current we have access to the "internals" with the Stasi and Germans can request their "Stasi Akte" (their Stasi case file to see what info the state had on them back when).
If you're into theatrical documentary style instead try to find a copy of "The Lives of Others" to watch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Definitely going to rewatch The Lives of Others after browsing all those Stasi bugs. Also I just learned the star of that film, Ulrich Mühe, practically lived the life of the film’s protagonist:
> After German reunification, Mühe allegedly discovered evidence in his Stasi file that he had been under surveillance not only by four of his fellow actors in the East Berlin theatre, but also by his wife
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_M%C3%BChe
I'm glad you've pointed this out. Comparisons to GDR and the Stasi often get ridiculed for being excessive and hyperbolic when in fact what's currently implemented would've been the Stasi's dream.
If anyone needs a good weekend movie recommendation, Das Leben der Anderen[1] is excellent and quite relevant.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
I wasn't expecting such a long answer, but thank you for it because it is a rather unique point of view in my filter bubble.
First, yes the difference between survey tools and communication tools is always confusing for me in the privacy debate. But ultimately, they are deeply linked [2] with many cases that fall in between. In particular, the surveillance of communication tools is incredibly pervasive.
> double so when I'm a guest
Yes, when I was in China, I was more careful to approach discussions with an open mind and cautiousness for the legal repercussions. However, I'm not talking about being a guest, I'm talking about either being a citizen or an outsider. In both cases I think it's very important to think critically and express the potentially resulting criticism. (More below)
> So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
Certainly not the CCP, lol. But seriously, more than WeChat/Tencent, which is just another interesting tech company, I'm judging the state control over it. And more than judging (but which I'm also doing), I'm formulating criticism based on observations of harm to people (I consider it evident that shutting up would be immoral) and (but this is our main point of disagreement) mind control by the state.
> Assange, Snowden, went too far.
It seems your threshold might be the word of law, but in that case they exposed illicit state actions. In any case, they did go far. To say they were co-opted is only partly true if not outright false: thanks to them, a significant portion of the population is defending itself and pushing for more scrutiny and changes.
> And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
States and governments do not have sensitivities. You can not hurt their feelings.
> these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks
I'm using the nazi culture as an experience that enables me to construct criticism of other cultures. Whenever I see something that looks like it, I'm indeed judging it very much.
And yes, credit scores and criminal problems have their own problems, thank you for helpful criticism/judging/insert the word you prefer. You absolutely have the "right" to say it thanks to the millions of people who fought for freedom against kings, tyrannies, authoritarian states and even normal governments. But beyond what the current laws say, the fact that you have functioning brain is enough to justify judging. How and when you express that judgement should reflect the potential negative and positive consequences of that. Here I think that in the long term, censorship has more negative effects than offending, and call me insensitive, but I think that people (including myself) should really get better at receiving criticism and society would be overall better for it.
> Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
Yes, these tools, and I did not say "fold back to isolation", but to be cautious when expanding the existing relative isolation, because we can not foresee all the consequences of doing that. See the increase in mental health problems linked to the use of social networks for example. This, other issues like [1] and higher-level thinking like this very good talk on surveillance capitalism [2] makes me think that no, this is not "already handled and taken care of".
> you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
Nope, absolutely not. We need to watch both and the West has its fair share of issues, see [2] for one of the many examples. However, I do think that China is closer : more outright lies from the government, concentration camps for Uiguhrs and muslims, press controlled and manipulated by the state, systemic censorship, disappearing journalists and whistle-blowers, etc. You can find examples of this in the US (except for concentration camps I guess), but they will be rarer and more subtle, mostly because the system was designed to distribute power more evenly and minimize potential for harm. Which beautifully comes back to my first point: giving more power/communication tools to individuals should not be taken lightly.
> For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I really see that point and myself I can not help but admire some of these aspects of China. However, systematic censorship of alternative views is one of the many other things China is not open about. The reason tracking is "secret" in the west is precisely because the individuals have more power, so saying it tips the scale doesn't really make sense. And because we have more power, we can work towards abolishing it. So if we think it's bad, we should. You aren't explaining why surveillance is good (see [2] on why it's bad), but you are essentially saying we should embrace it and it's not a big deal if we impose it on everyone.
> In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. [..] What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things.
I encourage you to watch the german movie The Lives of Others (2006) for a closer look at what privacy and surveillance mean in an authoritarian state. You can not "change countries": there was a wall in Berlin where people were shot on sight. You start by arguing for more respect and consciousness towards different cultures and ended by saying that it's okay for states to choose what you think and discriminate for thinking differently, because that is what the sentence "In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel" means. Restricting speech restricts what you can hear which restricts what you can think.
[1] https://medium.com/@monteiro/designs-lost-generation-ac7289549017 > "Bobbi Duncan was “accidentally” outed by Facebook when she was a college freshman. When Bobbi got to college she joined a queer organization with a Facebook group page. When the chorus director added her to the group, a notification that she’d joined The Queer Chorus at UT-Austin was added to her feed. Where her parents saw it. Bobbi had very meticulously made her way through Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings to make sure nothing about her sexuality was visible to her parents. But unbeknownst to her (and the vast majority of their users), Facebook, which moves fast, had made a decision that group privacy settings should override personal privacy settings. Bobbi was disowned by her parents and later attempted suicide. They broke things." I recommend the entire article, it's completely opposite to your point of view and makes a good case in favor of individual discernment followed by actions.
[2] The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4Y-uZG5zk
[3] Documentary on Uiguhrs "thought transformation camps" https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/087898-000-A/china-uyghurs-in-danger/
I'm very familiar with the Nacht und Nebel directive, but not with that particular film. In fact, "Night and Fog" was the first image that came to mind when I saw a protester being kidnapped and shoved into an unmarked vehicle recently. [1] I can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that it might be a good time to get off the fence and pick a side.
I've also found some post-war narratives out of Germany to be downright bone-chilling, such as 'The Lives of Others.' Definitely recommend that one if you haven't seen it. Are there any specific points raised by 'Night and Fog' that you have in mind?
1: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-06/video-undercover-san-diego-police-arresting-protester-unmarked-van
The Lives of Others is a beautiful movie.
I fell for the clickbait :)
Have a look at this scene from the fantastic film "The Lives of Others": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkRxvEjprBM
The odour conserve features at the end.
>grave new threat
There are two sides to the story of course. Repressive governments can follow who's up to what on social media and the like but on the other hand encrypted global communications and ubiquitous video make it much easier to expose bad stuff happening. It's interesting to watch the very good movie Lives of Others to get a feel of what things were like as recently as 1984 when it's set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
A realisation hit me a few years back that those in power are not especially shielded from this, with cases that emerge periodically. There was General David Petraeus, brought down through a shared Gmail account (he and a lover would compose, but not send, messages). The FBI got on-board to that. Various investigations associated with major politicians. The known hacking of both Democratic and GOP politicians' personal accounts (notably John Podesta and Colin Powell, though certainly others), and more.
Other cases -- Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are both exemplars -- show that widely-known incriminating information can remain in broad circulation for decades without harm. It's somewhat less the information itself than the political and power balances surrounding it, which precipitate the final fall.
In the film Das Leben den Anderen (The Lives of Others), a fictional-but-highly-realistic account of the East German surveillance state, among the most poignant aspects was not the brutal suppression of political opposition, but the corruption and co-option of the surveillance system for personal gain and enjoyment -- the East German official coercing Christa-Maria (played by Martina Gedeck) into an affair that was effectively rape.
I've pointed out that Herbert Simon's defence of a data-intensive world on the grounds that the Nazis accomplished their atrocities without the benefit of automated data processing has since proven quite false: IBM were a willing and active enabler.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599647
Data and information change behaviours in subtle ways. I'm strongly convinced of this, though I wouldn't be able to define or describe all the ways.
The german film , The Lives of Others, captures this technique spectacularly.
> "scent jars"
Have a look at this scene from the fantastic film "The Lives of Others": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkRxvEjprBM
"The Lives of Others" of a moving film about the people on both sides of the East German microphone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Laws also change the other way around. For the longest time it was not illegal to be Jewish, or a Roma. Or an intellectual or an activist.
I suggest seeing The Lives of Others, a beautiful film about East Germany’s surveillance and it’s influence on people.
The film Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others) [1] is an incredible view into this world. I highly recommend it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTSdhmTJDyY
It's a great movie, but I wouldn't depend on it alone for a fact like that.
The Lives of Others, another serious and moving film, shows the protagonist solo-monitoring a dissident in order to not report the latter's dissidence. The Stasi required its spies to work in pairs to plug that specific vulnerability. This was crucial to the plot and gave people a false idea of what resistance to a then-modern tyranny is like. (Disclaimer: actual East German dissidents have approved of the movie, while I'm just a guy with an opinion.)
There was a plot point in the film, "The Lives of Others," where the East German police keep a registration and fingerprint of all typewriters, and find a document written on an unregistered typewriter.
The precedents for machine identity go way back. The only difference is at least here, you don't need a license or registration for a printer, albeit you do in effect for a mobile device.
Remember to act surprised.
You mean "The lives of others"? "Run Lola Run"? "Goodbye Lenin"? "Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo"? "Fack ju Göhte"?
I know there are bad German movies. But with the biggest film studio in Europe being right next to Berlin, I think saying "there are no good German movies" it's a bit too much. The fact alone that there are decent German movies for children seems to me like a plus - I probably won't go see "Das schönste Mädchen der Welt", but I'm not opposed to it.
Disclaimer: I liked Danni Lowinski, and would like to watch Deutschland 83.
I guess one factor is that Germans traditionally care deeply about privacy. This is in no small part due to our history of privacy violations, e.g. the state spying on its citizens during the Nazi years, but also in Eastern Germany during the country's partition. See the excellent film „The Lives of Others“ for an example of the latter.
I wouldn't be surprised: a lot of Germans used to be East Germans, and the Stasi were pretty thorough in their surveillance. EDIT: Watch "The Lives of Others" when you get a chance. It's a great movie about relating to the subject.
As for your issue, hearing the sound is a form of noise pollution. Its generally acceptable to have that during 9 to 5 but not during the night. Because it interferes with people's sleep, you can call the cops for a complaint. Not sure what they'd do if the drone owner is the FBI though.
As for the long term health effects of surveillance, we got Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives Of Others) [1] already but additionally I'm anticipating seeing that covered in the documentary The Feeling of Being Watched about Operation Vulgar Betrayal. Quoting the About page [2]:
"In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where director Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers hundreds of pages of declassified FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counterterrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. before 9/11 – code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal.”
With unprecedented access, The Feeling of Being Watched weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker’s examination of why her community fell under blanket government surveillance. Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy shrouding what happened to her neighborhood in the 90’s and probes why her community feels like they’re still being watched today. In the process, she confronts long-hidden truths about the FBI’s relationship to her community.
The Feeling of Being Watched follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation, while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family."
Documentary is scheduled for 2018. Kickstarter page [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
[2] http://www.feelingofbeingwatched.com/about
[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beingwatched/the-feeling-of-being-watched-a-documentary-film
Maybe a bit off topic, but for an entertaining and chilling way to understand why Germans are so opposed to listening devices, watch _Das Leben der Anderen_ (The Lives of Others).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
Yes, it absolutely is. Outlawing private communications between citizens (or subjects, in the UK's case) is not the first step down this particular slippery slope, it's well past the halfway point.
I recommend watching a movie called The Lives of Others, to those who don't understand or agree. It should be available on either Netflix or Amazon, or if all else fails, the Pirate Bay.
The Lives of Others, which takes place in East Germany and includes a typewriter which is not registered with the government; was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. And it's ultimately the live we'll live as tracking technologies continue to get better.
An East German version of this, with Erich Honecker in place of Brezhnev, is told by a young Stasi recruit in the 2006 film "Das Leben der Anderen". Spoiler alert: The attempt at humor proves severely career-limiting.
1984; the film "Brazil" (1985); "The Lives of Others" (about the Stasi); Snowden's film and revelations; the history of dictatorships and surveillance, etc; I could also make many specific arguments.
But my point wasn't any of this: just that most of HN strongly feels against surveillance and the capabilities mentioned.
I don't want to take a side I just want the contradiction to be put front and center in these cases. It will lead to everyone on HN having a better position, when they do eventually take one. I still think we don't need to have that argument here (or in most cases where it comes up).
> I hope that there will be a day when Google and Facebook will combine forces and work on a sequel to "The Lives of Others" [0].
Yeah, that's a great movie.
The only difference being that the user now believes that she isn't being tracked now.
I hope that there will be a day when Google and Facebook will combine forces and work on a sequel to "The Lives of Others" [0].
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
An infamous country tried the "intrusion on privacy" route, with a result one could best characterize as "chilling." It was called East Germany. It would behoove everyone to watch the excellent dramatic film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others .
Once you embark on the quest to learn japanese, you begin to look for other avenues to hone in on those skills -- whether its finding other people who speak it, or in some people's cases, play on japanese gaming servers, or skyping/hangouts and converse with japanese people in full immersion. After that you want to start reading more literature, so you do what anyone would do and search for japanese books on Amazon. After a while amazon starts offering you remarkable suggestions based on what the majority of japanese speaking people are reading.
You would be surprised how much you could learn on your own!
My case it was german. I was so fascinated with the german language, and germany as a whole, in part I must sadly admit because I was such an avid fan of WW2 history. I actually tried to go the traditional route, and I hated it. I noticed one time some germans playing counterstrike and other MMORPG's I was playing. I got to know them better, in part because of their extreme delight in my ability to say a few things in german. Then it turned into ventrilo/teamspeak sessions, which then turned into me wanting to read actual german books, then it went on to learning about Otto Von Bismarck, German Reunification, the East/West cultural divide, watching foreign german films such as Der Unterfall, Das Leben der Anderen, Good Bye, Lenin!, effects German engineering such as Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and von Braun, which led me down the path of looking into german businesses, especially the ones that are here in my own home state (which are many), it was so much fun!
edit: I realize you qualified it with 'business' people, implying they won't see the value of learning the other things, but since business people is a large group (of which I myself can be considered a part of) I imagine there are others like me.
There is a certain morbid curiosity about it, for the same reason that people watch Big Brother obsessively. Worth watching "The Lives of Others" if you haven't already, though that deals with other problems.
There is an argument that laboratory psychology testing is prone to bias. Any study which relies on self-reporting is liable to people under or overestimating. Any study which requires consent inevitably attracts people who would be interested in being experimented on. Morality aside, performing experiments and studies on people who have absolutely no idea what's going on is the ultimate way to remove bias.
The sort of 'results' that come out of Foos' 'study' are fascinating because they simply cannot be obtained by any legal means. People behave differently when they know they're being observed. However fascination doesn't necessarily imply scientific utility...
The sex is actually the least fascinating thing about the journals - even Foos was continually disappointed by how dull his subjects were sexually. What's interesting are his observations on the minutiae in people's lives, the mundane things people do when they know they're not being watched (even something as 'weird' as sitting on a toilet backwards).
I cannot recommend "The Lives of Others" enough.
Won an Academy Award in 2006 for best foreign film.
Ebert review: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070920/REVIEWS/70920002
Another, very moving, review: http://www.nationalreview.com/content/great-lives
And the film has two or three great Honecker jokes. :-)
Btw, I’ll suggest the movie "Das Leben der Anderen".
Even today in German schools the GDR and the Nazi time are some of the most important topics in history class, including us visiting the places, talking to eye witnesses, etc.
That leaves quite an impression.
Aside from the rather obvious issues of accuracy in the related anecdotes (as coldtea pointed out), it's a shame that the author of this piece doesn't mention one aspect in which the rise-and-fall nature is not a full circle: although in a tribal society you may have less privacy, there is also less reason to fear a lack of it.
Unlike small, homogeneous groups with intimate hierarchies, modern society is huge, the data available on your life is enormous, and the ability of someone to hurt you with that data (be it through impersonation or accusation) or indeed you to hurt someone else is virtually unlimited. There's no discussion of the ways in which the potential consequences of the violation of privacy make us more protective of it ("The Lives of Others" is a great film on the subject).
Maybe at some point we can achieve a society where the power structures and human relationships are such that we can again be as open again with strangers as we once were with our immediate families/communities, and in so doing relax about the need for strict rights of privacy. But right now the stakes are too high.
Fair enough :-). I just assumed everyone knew who the Stasi were! I can't recommend the film The Lives of Others enough. Really is a scary insight into the end game of a surveillance state...
it was the same with typewriters; one could track the exact typewriter model by patterns on the printed text.
In the Soviet Union and other communist countries the state security service would have samples of the print on all typewriters in the country. So they had the ability to track the typewriter if you would get an idea to write a flier or manuscript against the government. (In the movie 'The lives of others' they had a Stasi man who could identify all typewriters in east germany)
Now i thought that that was all due to the paranoid nature of Stalinism; it never appeared to me that western typewriters could also be identified by their type and that this was probably an intended feature, not just a bug. Now the same principle was later applied to laser printers ...
Will we be seeing a movie made about this in 20 years as we did with "The Lives of Others" in 2006?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
Here's a joke told in the movie The Lives of Others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8vDQaAYaQg
I think I saw the movie on Vudu. It's a very moving story about the secret police, and the people they spy on. Really, watch it. As others have said, we're not so far away from this in time, and there are many, many people who lived through it.
who and how actively they are doing it should be the main issue here
Yes, it absolutely is.
Yet for some reason you keep trying to defend their Orwellian ambitions with some handwavy "they have always been spying, it's their job"...
The NSA is not "spying" in the romantic sense that you seem to be caught up in.
It is installing global surveillance, a google index of all communications worldwide (ICREACH). This goes far beyond keyword sniffing on phonecalls or opening letters.
They are implementing the exact kind of surveillance that totalitarian regimes are condemned for (see e.g. the movie "The Lives of Others"), at an unprecedented scale.
And their justification is the defense against a "threat" that is less likely to harm you or me than a lightning strike.
If you can't see the blatant disproportion here, and the extreme concentration of power in an institution that has largely detached itself from democratic checks and balances, then you must really have paid not much attention to the Snowden revelations.
If the security services in East Germany thought you weren't secure, you'd be working menial jobs for life, if you weren't in prison. In the USA, is a "security clearance" necessary to go to university? To work as a doctor?
There's a bit in the film "The Lives of Others", where a neighbour sees the Stati agent install bugs. The agent tells the neighbor that if she tells the target he's being bugged, then her daughter will lose her place in university. One of the characters in the film is a director of plays. He has "lost his security clearance" for critiquing the regime, was blacklisted and couldn't work.
I cannot recommend the film "The Lives of Others" too highly.
Go watch it.
So the mailman now remembers every letter you've written, the policeman is able to trick your cell phone into telling you where you are and whom you're calling, the state security service is monitoring all of your electronic correspondence, and the IRS is able to _read_ any of your papers it wants as long as your account has been flagged -- no warrant or judicial action necessary.
Remind me where I live again? Because when I grew up, we were the free and open society and the other guys, the bad guys, were the ones in everybody's knickers. (Recommended movie: The Lives Of Others)
Of note here is that it was the Assistant State Attorney, not the cops, that had problems with being honest with the court. There's a guy who needs to be disbarred.
Any country in charge of its own currency can always fund a war without a vote by simply printing more of it for itself (debasing the currency of course via "invisible tax"), which is why I support cryptocurrencies.
Any person who is OK with mass surveillance has clearly never seen the movie The Lives of Others ("Das Leben der Anderen," yes it's German with English subtitles, deal with it) http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lives_of_others/ because to watch that movie is to watch the fall of a country which was destroyed by "too much introspection," as it were.
East Germany already tried that — you are basically describing the Stasi program of "unofficial collaborators." From The Legacy of Surveillance[0]: "For every 1,000 GDR citizens there were approximately 5.5 state security personnel and another 11 unofficial informers. About 1 in 50 of the country’s adults were working for the Stasi and enabled the ministry to conduct an almost blanket surveillance of society."
The movie The Lives of Others is an acclaimed look at living under such ubiquitous surveillance. Without spoiling the plot, agents bugged apartments, blackmailed family members and tapped phones. Not every citizen was looked at intensely as the characters in the film, but millions of East Germans made it into the agency's files. Wired reported in 2008 that the Stasi had indexed their records by 5.6 million names. [1] Even people who hadn't been overtly persecuted by the Stasi are often concerned their friends were spying on them. There's concrete evidence of grossly undermined trust, too: The paper I cite above suggests that East Germany's economic problems are partly due to distrust caused by the unofficial collaborators.
[0]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1554604
[1] http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-02/ff_stasi
The Conversation is just perfect. It's worth a watch for sure. While we're thinking about surveillance themed films, The Lives of Others comes to mind as a strong recommendation:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
I think "The lives of others" was a great movie. I'd recommend it.
I didn't watch The Lives of Others (will do, thanks for suggestion).
The Conversation's IMDB rating is 8.0, which is why I watched it, and while the movie was not bad, it was boring :)
netflix thinks i will give it 4.6 stars...did you like The Lives of Others?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
I find similarities between this incident and the interrogation technique of the secret police in East Berlin. I learned about this in a movie I watched a few days back- "The Lives of Others" or "Das Leben der Anderen" (2006). The secret police used to detain people and question them repeatedly for many hours while forcing them to sit on lie detectors with their palm faced down under their thigh. Under pressure, innocent people would start to answer different versions to the same questions, while suspected revolutionists would keep narrating the same 'stories'. I think sooner or later every government starts acting the same way. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
"The Lives of Others" (Das Leben der Anderen) is an excellent German film that dramatically shows the intrusiveness of the Stasi (secret police) into daily life in the former East Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
In the film you can see some of the techniques used by Wolfgang Schmidt and his colleagues.
Merkel isn't exactly a proponent of digital privacy[1][2]. It's unbelievable that the government of a country where the Stasi were operating in living memory aren't incensed by this. If anyone's interested in a film showing what life was like under the regime, The Lives of Others is a haunting exploration of that period, particularly relevant to what's happening right now.
[1]http://infowars.net/articles/september2007/050907Merkel.htm
[2]http://www.dw.de/german-chancellor-merkel-rebuffed-on-terrorism-surveillance-bill/a-3833855
Were you under arrest? Because if not, you could have walked out of there any minute you wanted to.
Anyway, watch The Lives of Others (or just the beginning, available here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu-NJA4Y1RI) to see it from the other side. It is a very good movie.
There were thaw periods around the countries of the block and agencies sometimes tended to chill out a bit with their activites, but on the other hand on Berlin's memorials you can find people whose deaths are dated even just a few months before the falling of the wall, so I don't know, to be honest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others#Reception
Slavoj Žižek, reviewing the film for In These Times, criticized the film's perceived softpedaling of the oppressiveness of the German Democratic Republic, as well as structure of the playwright's character, which he thought was not very likely under a hard communist regime.[23] Anna Funder, the author of the book Stasiland, in a review for The Guardian called The Lives of Others a "superb film" despite not being true to reality. She claims that it was not possible for a Stasi operative to have hidden information from superiors because Stasi employees themselves were watched and almost always operated in teams
Speaking of Stasi, I would like to recommend a great movie called The Lives of Others
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
If anyone's interested in learning a bit more about the Stasi, The Lives of Others is a great film about a man who works for the Stasi, tasked with spying on some influential people.
In ex Yugoslavia we had secret laws, published by secret official journal and enforced by secret courts.
So you could easily get persecuted for breaking the law that you were prohibited to know it even existed.
The same was going on in east Germany and other socialist countries.
I warmly recommend watching The Lives of Others (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/) to those who haven't seen it yet.
I know it's only movies and TV but these were still interesting to watch on all things data retention and surveillance state and are related to the topic:
The Listening - 2006 (specifically on Echelon) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427461/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlVK906Xzr8
The Conversation (1974) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4g
The Lives of Others (2006) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Spying on the Home Front (PBS, 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/
The Enemy Within (PBS, 2006) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/
The Wire, Season 1 (HBO, 2002) Brazil (1985) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
I would tell anyone to watch the 'Lives of Others' - great film about how surveillance can be abused.
East Germany was by far the most advanced and capitalist of the Communist states, and very close culturally to West Germany, but there is still the phenomenon of "Ostalgie", from Ost=East + Nostalgie=Nostalgia, yearning for the good ol' days of Communist suppression.
The movie 'The Lives of Others' was motivated by the filmmakers' desire to smack down the Ostalgie-types achieving popularity in Germany. It is common there to see shops selling East German themed stuff, and there is at least one chain of shops solely dedicated to East German paraphernalia. Polls suggest there is a real yearning in some areas to go back to the days where the secret police and rationing of basic goods were real things. It's bizarre.
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html#communism
It is not very well known however that Germany saw a much more vigilant communism hunt at about the same time. While in the US only about a dozen people ever went to prison for being Communists, that same number runs in the thousands in Germany. The communist party was forbidden by the German high court, and party members who continued their activities were arrested and sent to prison.
Need we forget that the Stasi of the hostile East German state were right next door?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the city. It was widely regarded as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. The Stasi motto was "Schild und Schwert der Partei" (Shield and Sword of the Party), that is the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Now considered a criminal organisation, several Stasi officials were prosecuted for their crimes after 1990.
Lest we forget, the GDR was also a vassal of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, and the KGB was not an imaginary entity. Communism was no joke. See "The Lives of Others" if you want to see what East Germany was like when this guy grew up:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/
Incredibly, not a single mention of East Germany or the GDR in this entire document.
To each their own. I enjoy a large assortment of films. The Avengers and Batman Begins - or 12 Monkeys and The Usual Suspects - or The Triplettes of Bellville and The Lives of Others - or 12 Angry Men and The Seventh Seal. Hardly fair to say that someone who would 'enjoy' 'cinema' would 'rather pluck their eyes out' than 'watch' a 'film' like this 'anywhere'.
Interestingly, you used the term 'Film' to describe The Avengers, which some people would jump down YOUR throat for - since this was an almost All-Digital release.
This goes beyond the point at hand. I'm not necessarily disagreeing (I'm not from the US), but we're discussing the compulsive need to translate culture, present in the US but in other parts of the world (like aforementioned french-speaking world).
Trying to define the racial "identity" of what's American and who consider it such is a slight straw man. Regardless of who is or isn't American, and what languages they speak, we're discussing the need for "original" titles.
Here in France, referring to the movie by its title "Das Leben Der Anderen" would raise eyebrows at best, it would often get you dismissed as pedantic douche. In other parts of the world, it's a given that you just don't translate titles.
Off the off topic: why is the English world so intent on translating everything? (Much like the French world I guess)
In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium we try to refer to most movies in their original language (Das Leben Der Anderen, Cidade De Deus, ...), though we do seem to have trouble with Asian titles where we for some obscure reason default to using the English title. Edit: We do translate children's movies.
Off topic, but the image is apt as it's from a film called "The Lives of Others", set in East Germany in 1984, about a secret police agent who conducts surveillance on a dissident writer. IMO it's a very well done and moving film, and well worth watching, especially given that the period is within relatively recent memory--well, for some of us! ;)
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/ Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lives_of_others/
Agreed.. how is Instagram suppose to replace "The Lives of Others", "Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars"?
Movies (and books etc.) can tell so many different stories. Social networks can, at best, tell the stories of people very much like yourself.
"If I were deliberately smearing AB, I'd try to concoct a reason to mention him as you do in posts also mentioning "pedophile" and "schizophrenic" as often as possible, only I'd use logic that wasn't such an indiscriminate stretch."
Yeah, I would, too.
But, I'm being sincere. This is creepy behavior from a guy who was not listening to reason from anyone around him.
I don't think anyone needs to smear him...anyone who reads the emails can't come away thinking this guy is a good guy. I'm just ranting because this whole thing is terrifying to me.
The thought that our government might be funding this kind of insanity under the guise of "national security" is...well, have you ever seen The Lives of Others? It's a great film about the Stasi in East Germany, and how they read everything, watched everyone, kept dossiers on everyone, and basically just kept an eye on every single person on the off chance they might be up to something. This, to me, is the modern equivalent...though I would hope it's not taking place in any actual police office.
I think one of the most well known and egregious example of large scale surveillance outfit is the Stasi. It's reported that there was one informer per every 6 and a half people. Possibly the highest ratio of all known examples.
Stasiland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasiland is a fascinating read. And of course "The Lives of Others" is a must watch. If for no other reason than to experience an eloquent demonstration of powerful yet understated acting.
- I Heart Huckabees - You, Me And Everyone We Know - Juno - The Straight Story - My Neighbour Totoro
Are all straight forward feel good movies.
- Caché - The Lives Of Others - The White Ribbon - The Fountain - Amores Perros - City Of God - Fargo - Dune - Castle In The Sky - Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Festen
Make you feel good simply by the presence of their across the board brilliance.
Fight Club : A bit over the top, but works for me.
Cidade de Deus (City of God) : Overcoming adversity, based on real life story.
Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (Amelie) : Beautiful movie about seeing the world in a different way. Love is worth fighting for. Don't be afraid to be eccentric.
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives Of Others) : Even the harshest repressive regimes cannot re-educate and brainwash all the humanity out of people.
Das Boot : How I feel when I need to finish a project while the management throws "depth charges" (feature requests ;-) ) at me.
Hotel Rwanda : People are capable of both extreme violence and extreme kindness.
Zerkalo (The Mirror) by Tarkovksy : Nostalgia. Reminds me to keep connected to my parents and family. Eventually they'll be gone, with only dreams and memory fragments of them left.
I went through similar pains getting the data off of my Amiga systems before I sold them when moving to the valley (I'd long since gotten rid of all of my C64 stuff, so not quite as ancient). It's surprisingly complicated when all of the "usual" methods (USB memory key, CD/DVD ROM, network) are unavailable. Even though the Amiga could write to a 720K DOS format floppy, I no longer have any machines that have a floppy drive, and I had several things to move that were too big, anyway, and would have had to be split via whatever archiving program I used on the Amigas (lzh, maybe?) which I didn't remember how to do. I used to connect to the Internet via modem on the Amiga, which might have worked, but I no longer have a phone line to hook it up to or dial up internet service.
Ended up going the serial route, and still had to dig an old PC out of the closet because my current PCs don't have them. But, I finally did get all of my MODs off of the machines. Took about a week from deciding I was going to do it to getting the cable and software working.
And, "The Lives of Others" is a fantastic film.