Posted on 06/27/2014 3:18:10 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Germany’s domestic intelligence service wants to increase surveillance on users of social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, but stressed it would only target terrorists and extremists. […]
But the Süddeutsche Zeitung had reported that the BfV’s chief, Hans-Georg Maaßen, wanted to develop a system which collected “large amounts of online data”. …
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.de ...
Hmmm...the article does not say how the German domestic intelligence service, would define extremists.
So they will have lots of folks surfing Facebook. Either in person (which will be necessary to analyze the content of images) or automated. This isn’t an issue to me. If you are doing something necessary that will raise government ire, you probably are wise not to shout about it on Facebook or tweet it on Twitter etc.
SD, STASI - Long history of that sort of thing in Germany.
Even going back to the mid-1800s, the Communist Manifesto mentioned “German police-spies” right in its English translation of the preamble (from “Deutsche Polizisten”, oddly).
Why merely “raise government ire”? After all, being pro-Constitution “raises” the “ire” of the Obama administration. When people fear the government, that’s tyranny, remember?
My country ‘tis of thee,
sweet land of tryanny,
of thee I sing.
Land where my father died.
He was a German spy
Caught by the FBI
Of thee I sing.
On the other hand it really ought to be soberly considered before offering yourself as a sacrificial lamb.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation.… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. …That there is a big lesson for us today, especially when it comes to comparing with what people like Washington did.
I am sure the Iraqi soldiers captured by ISIL after dropping weapons concure.
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