Gene Healy Says the NSA Isn’t the Stasi, but It’s Bad Enough

Leave it to the
Washington Post, this overgrown company town’s paper of
record, to put things in perspective. Along with “how to get rich
in the new Washington,” the WaPo website announced Nov. 18 that
“NSA’s got nothing on German Stasi.” “Victims of the fearsome
Communist East German secret police say: not so fast” to
comparisons of National Security Agency spying with the Cold-War
era Stasi, the Post reports. Anyone “who dared criticize
their government” — even in private — “could wind up disappearing
into its penal system for years.” Of course the Stasi was orders of
magnitude worse than the National Security Agency, agrees Gene
Healy. How comforting should that be?

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