Loose Lips

Digby has been quite attentive to this. (More graphics here).

Sinister? At the very least, inappropriate in a democracy. And I have to say: it also seems pretty much an extension of your average organization's approach to employee management.

Sure, your foreign types have their own attitudes toward spying on citizens.

That article's author makes a point of noting that the NSA's reach made a former high-ranking Stasi officer feel "appalled." Or was the emotion jealousy?

A former victim of the Stasi says—

"When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew. ... A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other."

At this week's Morning Huddle (and here, I do have to repeat myself)—the theme is Don't Worry.

I also have to repeat myself in quoting the suggestion to go for a stress-relieving walk (just remember: move along; nothing to see).

To quote more of the Stasi/Homeland Security-Industrial Complex comparisons—

[the German spokeswoman for Stasi records]...noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.

"It's easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists," she said.

Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin's East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.

"When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew," he said. "A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

"The lesson," he added, "is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA."