Metadata & The East German Secret Police

In her book” Dragnet Nation”, Julia Anwgin of the Wall Street Journal, provides a report on the East German secret police aka Stasi. She says the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today’s standards. While researching her book Dragnet Nation, she obtained hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed

The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an
“aunt,” “Operational Case Jentzsch,” presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German
poet who defected to the West in 1976), places (“church”), and meetings (“by
post, by phone, meeting in Hungary”).

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