ACLU's Most Recent Statement on No Fly No Buy Lists.

[jtuck004]

53. There was a place called East Germany, had a police force called the Stasi. They operated

under that philosophy, that the safety of the state, the safety they were ordered to keep, was more important than your right to anything.
Heck of a philosophy - "If you see something, say something" - but no one argued that they were safer.

We aren't safer when our own politicians swear allegiance to such action either.

Here's an excerpt of a review of "Stasi
The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police"

REVENGE VERSUS
THE RULE OF LAW

"Worse than the Gestapo." —Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi hunter


Less than a month after German demonstrators began to tear down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, irate East German citizens stormed the Leipzig district office of the Ministry for State Security (MfS)—the Stasi, as it was more commonly called. Not a shot was fired, and there was no evidence of "street justice" as Stasi officers surrendered meekly and were peacefully led away. The following month, on January 15, hundreds of citizens sacked Stasi headquarters in Berlin. Again there was no bloodshed. The last bit of unfinished business was accomplished on May 31 when the Stasi radioed its agents in West Germany to fold their tents and come home.
...
The people's ire was running equally strong against the regular Stasi informers, the inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs). By 1995, 174,000 had been identified as IMs, or 2.5 percent of the total population between the ages of 18 and 60. Researchers were aghast when they found that about 10,000 IMs, or roughly 6 percent of the total, had not yet reached the age of 18. Since many records were destroyed, the exact number of IMs probably will never be determined; but 500,000 was cited as a realistic figure. Former Colonel Rainer Wiegand, who served in the Stasi counterintelligence directorate, estimated that the figure could go as high as 2 million, if occasional stool pigeons were included.

"The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people," according to Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, who has been hunting Nazi criminals for half a century. "The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million." One might add that the Nazi terror lasted only twelve years, whereas the Stasi had four decades in which to perfect its machinery of oppression, espionage, and international terrorism and subversion.

To ensure that the people would become and remain submissive, East German communist leaders saturated their realm with more spies than had any other totalitarian government in recent history. The Soviet Union's KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830 citizens. Using Wiesenthal's figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one officer for 2,000 people. The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests.
...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/koehler-stasi.html

The knee-jerk response is that we are different. I submit we are one election away from moving further down that road than we ever thought.

I think. Because we have already gone down the path a little too far.