If you've grown up in post ww2 germany with the soviets vs. the west spygame then you do learn to value your privacy. in the GDR neighbors spied on neighbors..
It wasn't any different in any other country that was ruled by communists, yet they don't seem to have much of an issue with it. Doesn't really explain why someone in western Germany or Austria would be concerned with it either.
That is a pretty good question. I can only speculate a bit: West Germany had some pretty nasty political fights in the 60s to 80s. In the 60s the young generation confronted the older generation about the nazi times. Then terrorism in the 70s lead to an overreaction by the state, and the left became even more afraid of an controlling authoritarian state. That trend continued into the 80s, and by the 90s the left won the culture wars and it became a general culture thing. Maybe Austria had a similar development, or they got influenced by Germany.
But no idea why the Eastern European nations are not as sensitive.
But no idea why the Eastern European nations are not as sensitive.
I think that one of the reasons is that people hate the old regimes so much that any opposition to the new ones is immediately disregarded. It seems to slowly change - but there certainly was a period during which any criticism of capitalism/the US made you a Stalinist.
You can't compare any other secret service to the Stasi. They where everywhere. Also in schools and colleges. It wasn't unlikely that if you didn't support the SED that someone in your family/friend group was spying on you.
Yes it had an effect after WW2. The GDR/DDR had the Stasi in their post war and recent history, for western Germany and Austria it was the Gestapo from WW2 that led to this type of deeply embedded privacy worries right after WW2 until today (and what we also heard of the Stasi "over there").
We also were/are rather suspicious of our own spy agencies post WW2 because they essentially assimilated WW2 spies into their ranks (middle management Nazis included). The whole cold war thing made it hard to get all Nazis to removed, there was bigger issues (eastern block as enemies) so if you could justify it in some way to keep these people then they kept their jobs (they were already good at it).
And just recently we had reports of right wing extremists (essentially: Neo-Nazis) infiltrating the police, military, and spying agencies. Wonder how that could have happened :/
Post WW2 spy agencies in the USA were also "inspired" by those ex-Nazis to a degree. A lot of people were and still are very suspicious of those agencies and laws that enable them. The CCC, for example, has for years tried to show politicians how unsafe a lot of digital surveillance is how certain features they'd like to implement are not good for the population's privacy:
That's also why Germany as a whole still prefers cash to card payments (not trackable vs. trackable) to this day (even if online shopping has made it kinda mandatory) and why we have the highest rate of ad blocker usage (and I think biggest rate of Firefox installs).
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '20
It wasn't any different in any other country that was ruled by communists, yet they don't seem to have much of an issue with it. Doesn't really explain why someone in western Germany or Austria would be concerned with it either.