“A former agent of the Stasi, the much-feared East German communist secret police, has said that the recently revealed NSA spying program would have been his agency’s ‘dream come true’ because it has collected ‘so much information, on so many people.’ Wolfgang Schmidt, 78, said in an interview that it is ‘the height of naivete’ to think that the information will never be used against U.S. citizens. As a lieutenant colonel in the Stasi, he said that technology limited the secret police’s ability to satisfy its voracious appetite for information. Their listening devices, he said, could only spy on 40 telephone lines at once. Targets had to be prioritized.”
