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Berlin's Digital Exiles: Where Tech Activists Go To Escape the NSA
An anonymous reader writes with this story about how Berlin has become a haven for Laura Poitras and other journalists who want to limit the amount of NSA disruption in their lives. "It's the not knowing that's the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. 'Not knowing whether I'm in a private place or not.' Not knowing if someone's watching or not. Though she's under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist 'hard but not impossible'. It's on a personal level that it's harder to process. 'I try not to let it get inside my head, but I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure I'm having a private conversation or something, I'll go outside.'
.....We're having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where she'd moved to make a film about surveillance before she'd ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a 'watch list'. Every time she entered the US – 'and I travel a lot' – she would be questioned. 'It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do what's called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and oftentimes take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff.' She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin."
.....We're having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where she'd moved to make a film about surveillance before she'd ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a 'watch list'. Every time she entered the US – 'and I travel a lot' – she would be questioned. 'It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do what's called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and oftentimes take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff.' She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin."
Germany?
How times have changed...
Required reading for internet skeptics
that the USA's NSA would be the successor of East Germany's Stasi, 25 years after the Berlin wall fell.
No you don't. You just don't realize that the people who fled here in the 17th century to avoid the oppressive regime in England created a whole new oppressive regime for the indigenous people. And it was so rampant into the 18th century that they wrote an entire constitution (that didn't apply to said indigenous people, or the slaves that were imported) to try and protect it. Then in the 19th century, half the country tried to repress the other half - destroying their entire way of life. By the 20 the century we were into your bedroom and your liquor cabinet trying to impose morality on the immoral. And we can't forget McCarthysim - oooh, that was a really good one, followed by the Hoover FBI.
Oppression is as much a part of humanity as humanity itself.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's interesting to contrast the German/European concept of freedom with the one out outline in your post about the US.
In Europe people see the government as their instrument to protect themselves from marauding corporations, poor health and extreme poverty. In the US those things are welcomed in exchange for the slim chance of getting rich, or at least no interference from government. In one view the government is a tool that society uses collectively, in the other it is a necessary evil that is inflicted on you. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC