Tag Archives: Secret Police

FSB, DGSI, FBI…

December 28, 2025 By in Hard Facts, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s all BfV to me.

Recruiting for Germany’s Secret Police – Like almost any other country – the Russian Tsar’s Okhrana (later: NKVD and now: FSB), Iran’s feared SAVAK, Pinochet’s torturing DINA, South Africa’s BOSS and NIS, Franco’s BSI, Mussolini’s OVRA, and Hoover’s FBI – Germany too has a secret police that today is no longer called Gestapo or Stasi. Yet Germany’s agency is distinctively different from, for example, France’s DGSI.

Deceptively labelled the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV), it spies on people. It operates in the shadows, in secret and by stealth. Being unnoticed and silent is of the essence.

How did they gather all that information without everybody carrying handheld surveillance monitors?

August 3, 2025 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, History, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

You know, like we do now?

Very impressive.

Stasi: How the GDR kept its citizens under surveillance – Do all intelligence agents live like James Bond? Not those who worked for East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (Stasi). A new book reveals the mundane lives of the agents.

“Comrades, we must know everything!”

The Stasi wasn’t all bad

September 9, 2024 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

They were good at secret house searches, for instance.

Will German police get to do secret house searches?

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office wants to secretly break into homes as part of anti-terrorism measures. That is currently prohibited, but the interior minister has far-reaching plans.

At first glance, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser’s (SPD) proposal is reminiscent of a method practiced by the “the Stasi,” the Ministry for State Security of the former communist East Germany, whose secret police infiltrated the homes of suspected regime opponents in order to tap their phones.

At second glance too.

Here’s How You Dress For Success

July 30, 2013 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, High Art, History, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

If you have ever dreamed of being a startlingly effective secret policeman in a paranoid German Communist dystopia, I mean.

Stasi

The Stasi fashion collection was extensive. The agency sent thousands of spies into West Germany and had access to vast amounts of cash to buy western goods to equip agents with.

“For me, the banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive.”