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?