Our Lives and "The Lives of Others"

“Das Leben des Anderen” is a 2006 German drama that describes in painful detail what life was like in the communist East Berlin of 1984, almost six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3_iLOp6IhM

The movie is not important because it showed how a famous actress was spied upon, her life, trials, and tribulations and the spying minions who answered to the Kommunistische Partei (Communist Party). It is important because it shows the drab and meager daily life of fear, uncertainty, and horror that people in general endured under communist regimes.

Like the actress in the movie, homes were bugged; all telephone conversations were recorded and listened to. All incoming and outgoing mail was opened, read, and copied by small bureaucrats whose job was to report anything out of the ordinary and catalog their daily blogs.

The secret police did not have sophisticated wireless technology to spy on citizens like we have today. They also did not seek nor need warrants to record everything people did or said in their homes, cars, on the phone, social media sites, or by email. They had the oppressive power of government on their side and technology was not advanced to the level that it is today.

There are so many ways now to cheat and steal personal and corporate information online and on the Dark Web that ethical hacking, penetration testing, and cybersecurity expertise have become real job descriptions.

Computer experts, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, have infiltrated the dark web globally to expose child predators and human trafficking by capturing live podcasts of predators. This is the positive side of online hacking.

It is not just the utility companies scanning our homes via smart meters for presumably just water, electricity, and gas consumption patterns; other companies and individuals invade our privacy via wireless devices, listening and watching everything we do and say, without a judicial warrant; we are being scanned from every direction 24/7.

Companies listen to our phones and bombard us minutes later with ads for products and drugs we discussed privately on the phone or searched online.

Thanks to social media, no informers must be hired to spy on us, we volunteer information daily. The huge databases that our government and private agencies are building on us would be the envy of the Stasi and of any former communist dictator’s spying soldiers and primitive machines. Without advanced technology, the Stasi was quite successful in keeping their population under control.

People under communism were asked to divulge to the Financial Police (that would be the equivalent of the IRS) what they owned, how much money they had hidden in the house, how they purchased certain goods, and why they ate sometimes better food than what was available on the market. Community organizers, not unlike ACORN, patrolled the streets. In exchange for better rations of food or a small monthly stipend, individuals were assigned per block of apartments to record the comings and goings into each apartment.

GPS tracking in our smart phones, cars, boats, appliances, cable TV, cameras, social sites, credit card purchases, streaming, online purchases, flights, and shopping enable faceless individuals to track us and our lives daily, information that is stored in all the AI data centers now mushrooming all over the country. Once all cash is replaced with digital currency, governments will be able to control us, reward, and punish us, from birth to death.

Satellites can take pictures with extreme accuracy. Drones can spy in your bedroom as you sleep. Smart meters relay information to the mother ship about your gas, electricity, water consumption, your appliances, whether you are home, if you are using medical devices, and sports equipment. Appliances can talk to the grocery store and place food orders for you. The utilities companies can turn off your electricity, water, A/C, and gas whether you want it turned off or not.

Content usage is monitored and access blocked or allowed based on politics. Leftist business owners firewall sites that contradict their views. YouTube takes down videos that offend liberals, thus stifling freedom of speech. Academia censors conservative professors by denying them tenure.

Facebook has censored conservative users, writers, and content developers for years. Publishers often turn down good conservative writers. MSM promotes political correctness and liberal views.

No matter where you turn, agents and technology are watching you - they are empowered by non-elected government bureaucrats and corporatists to spy on the “lives of others.”