‘For us, the most evil fruit of dictatorship was the secret service’

In the wake of further revelations in documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden to effect that the American NSA keeps records on the location of 5 billion mobile phone users worldwide, the victims of the Stasi, the former East German Ministry for State Security, have decided to take action. “Fourteen former civil rights activists in the GDR have published an appeal” to end espionage in Die Tageszeitung —

We call on the responsible citizens of our country, whether they grew up in the GDR or the Federal Republic: do not allow an international alliance of secret services, acting in the name of democracy and on the pretext of fighting terrorism, to target citizens with weapons that have the power to transform democracy into dictatorship in the blink of an eye. We must make ourselves heard. We must take action against our own resignation and political servility. We lived through the death of a dictatorship, and we are well capable of keeping democracy alive.