God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (29 page)

At the death of the hated Pope Paul IV, in 1559, the people of Rome stormed the headquarters of the Inquisition, freeing prisoners and destroying records. After the Berlin Wall came down, the people of East Berlin surged around the Stasi complex and eventually broke their way in. In this instance, the crowd was more interested in preserving records than in destroying them. Stasi operatives had burned or shredded what they could as the end drew near, but they could not overcome their own prowess: the archives had grown too vast. Desperate Stasi officials probably wished they had devoted some effort to developing a working prototype of Orwell’s memory holes. Orwell described them:

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

In the end, the Stasi managed to destroy only about 5 percent of its holdings before the East German regime collapsed. Many of the shredded documents have since been reconstructed, with the help of software that can select thin strands of paper from among a tangle of millions, and match the strands to one another.

Software for restoring shredded documents is one of only a few things the East Germans didn’t think to invent, judging from exhibits on display in the Stasi Museum, a forlorn domain that occupies a small building in the interior of the Stasi complex. It seems to exist in some strange middle state between tragedy and kitsch. The museum shop is threadbare. The café offers little, served by a sullen matron with the demeanor of Rosa Klebb. The museum is the creation of a group called Anti-Stalinist Action, and comes across as what it is: not the work of professional curators but something homemade, a bitter labor of love.

Certain artifacts stand out for their sheer banality—beer mugs and shot glasses with the Ministry of State Security’s coat of arms and the slogan “25 years of reliable protection.” They look like items you’d pick up in State College or Ann Arbor. One area of the museum is devoted to ways of concealing cameras: in ties and buttons, thermoses and trees, watering cans and trash cans. The padding of a bra is pulled away to reveal a lens. There is a machine for steaming open letters, at a rate of six hundred an hour. The Stasi was well aware of smugglers’ tricks. One display depicts confiscated Bible tracts, which had been discovered rolled up inside the inner tubes of bicycle tires. Along a wall by a window sit a number of sealed clear bottles that hold specimens of cloth. Stasi technicians had invented a device called the “smell chair,” whose cushion was fitted with an absorbent replaceable cover. During interviews, persons of interest would be seated in the chair; when they left, a sample of cloth would be kept in a bottle for some later use, usually involving dogs—for instance, determining if a suspect had been in a certain room, or hunting someone down.
In a corner of the main exhibit space stands a Stasi guardhouse, defaced with graffiti from the heady days of 1989. Painted on the front are the words
Freiheit fur Meine Akte
—“Freedom for my file.”

The files have their freedom now, in a sense. All told, the archives at the old cadet institute—Nazi and East German combined—occupy some sixty linear miles of shelf space. There is so much documentation at the Berlin Document Center that a new repository is being built, an annex to the building in the complex that was once the headquarters of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s personal guard. The Reich’s eagle has long since been removed. A graphic display explaining the project, in a makeshift structure near the entrance, has been given a technically correct yet blandly unrevealing title: “The New Building of the Federal Archives in Berlin—Located Between Contradictory Contexts of German History.”

The reading rooms at the BDC—one in a structure known as Building 901, another in a converted chapel nearby—can handle 150 researchers at a time. The workstations are always busy. As at any archive, there are lockers for coats and bags—a security precaution. There are forms to fill out, identification cards to produce. Officious librarians retrieve specific files. Some researchers are students and historians. Many are ordinary citizens with personal agendas. What happened to certain relatives? Who took the family’s property? Or, maybe, nothing more complicated than What was in my file?

The Tunnel of Truth

Francis Walsingham would scarcely recognize the Britain of today. It is a liberal, secular democracy of a model kind. The United Kingdom is the nation in whose judicial system Julian Assange, the beleaguered founder of WikiLeaks, decided to place his trust when he found himself in legal peril. The monarch remains the head of an established church, but there are now far more practicing Catholics in England than there are practicing Anglicans. And there are all those Muslims, a relatively new element, some of whom have resorted to violence for political ends, as some Irish did during the past generation.

The system will protect itself: here Walsingham would be back on comfortable ground. Faced first with an insurgency in Northern Ireland, beginning in the early 1970s, and then with threats of various kinds from radical Islam, the British government began to modernize its apparatus of surveillance and data collection. It is today a global leader. Britain maintains the largest DNA registry in the world. It is also covered by a system of some 4 million closed-circuit television cameras, the most comprehensive system anywhere.
The effort has been promoted by the government with the slogan “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”
In the autumn, when plant life thins, you can see that cameras have been in the flower boxes of clubs and hotels all along. Cameras linked to computers cover roads and highways. After Islamist terrorists unleashed a wave of attacks in London in July of 2005, the police were able to create a nearly continuous video montage of the suicide bombers as they drove in their car from Leeds to a train station outside London:

4
A.M.
–5
A.M.
: Speed cameras track the car heading south through the city’s leafy suburbs. . . . The bombers join the southbound M1 at junction 40 and their progress is tracked as they journey south along the spine of England.

6:30
A.M.
: After 160 miles on the M1, the Nissan Micra turns off at junction 11, arriving at Luton train station car park at around 6:50
A.M.

7
A.M.
: The four don their military-style rucksacks in the increasingly busy car park . . . CCTV cameras, designed to capture car thieves, film the four engaged in a final prayer.

7:40
A.M.
: The four bombers catch a Thameslink train, which winds through the affluent commuter belt of Hertfordshire towards King’s Cross.

8:26
A.M.
: The quartet are captured walking across the concourse of London’s busiest station. They are chatting; Hussain is laughing. Minutes later, they are huddled in a final, earnest conversation.

The surveillance system is a comfort to some, up to a point. It is also a source of unease. Databases of various kinds—commercial, public, private, medical, biological—are connected as never before. Legal procedures provide the authorities with wide latitude to hold suspects for significant periods, and to deport undesirables with a minimum of due process.
A British national identity card was scheduled to be phased in, but the scheme was put on hold in early 2011—the idea engendered too much public opposition.
Few doubt that the era of the identity card will one day come, and not just in Britain. Under a law passed in 2000, some 474 local governments and 318 government agencies are permitted to “self-authorize” the surveillance of British citizens—that is, they may, without the approval of a magistrate, have people followed, monitor their phone calls and e-mail, and record their activities surreptitiously with cameras. A woman in Dorset who became a target of such surveillance in 2008 was suspected, wrongly, of nothing more than sending her children to a school outside her district.

In 2012, London is scheduled to host the summer Olympics. Biometric identification is required for workers at major Olympics construction sites—everyone must negotiate iris and palm scanners.
Security plans call for Royal Air Force drones, equipped with optical and other sensing devices, to cruise above Olympic venues at all times.
Bomb-sniffing robots may mingle with the crowds. One idea that has been mentioned is the creation of a “tunnel of truth”—a passageway that would scan people attending the games for radiation, explosives, and biohazards, and at the same time use facial-recognition software to identify those who may be on watch lists.

Henry Porter, a columnist for the
Guardian
and the
Observer,
is one of the most persistent critics of a regime he fears is settling into place, as much through bureaucratic inertia and technological advance as through outright advocacy. Privacy erodes by degrees, each step sometimes seen as a sensible response to the circumstances and sometimes not seen at all. Porter’s dystopian thriller
The Bell Ringers
conjures a Britain in which the surveillance measures that already exist are pushed just a little further along, given just a little more interconnection. You buy some modernity, and you cede some privacy. A famous line in Tacitus notes how eagerly the people of ancient Britain took up Roman customs and devices, observing, “The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as civilization, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.”

It can be hard to separate the two. The process for obtaining a reader’s card to use the manuscript room at the British Library is easy, efficient, and swift. Much of it can be done online. A brief visit to a well-run office produces an actual card. The reading room itself is the most comfortable place imaginable, staffed by the same pallid, helpful clerks you’d have found there in 1950 or 1870. The rules are on a human scale. Four manuscripts at a time, no more! Pencils only, please! But CCTV cameras are everywhere, behind tasteful orbs of tinted glass. And I realized, as I checked the “past history” window of my account, that the library had a copy of my passport and driver’s license, had my e-mail address, had a record of every item I had looked up or requested, and probably saw that I had once taken out a pen to make a quick note when the point of my pencil broke. It’s a trade-off, and billions of people are making trade-offs of this sort every day.

A few years ago, I spent an afternoon with Admiral John Poindexter, a national security advisor under Ronald Reagan.
The small study in his home was filled with memorabilia—from Annapolis, the navy, the White House. His pipes stood in racks. Poindexter was called out of retirement in 2002 to head up the U.S. government’s Total Information Awareness Office, a visionary program to compile a vast database of personal information, including biometric and surveillance data, which could be analyzed by automated computer tools for patterns of suspicious activity. It was launched without much thought to public relations: its official seal depicted light from a Masonic eye falling ominously on planet Earth, above the Latin motto
Scientia est Potentia
—“Knowledge is Power.” The program was quickly defunded.

Poindexter was unapologetic. If America is going to combat asymmetric warfare waged by terrorists, he explained, it needs a lot more information. The world has changed since the bipolar days of the Cold War. Back then, we knew where the threat was coming from. We knew where the Soviets’ missiles were. We understood their communications systems. “Fast forward,” Poindexter said, “to a situation where the U.S. is the only superpower, and you have all of these non-state actors out there, and some rogue states. You have a much more difficult problem.”

Poindexter has often been portrayed as a caricature. He is in fact a thoughtful man. He laid out his thinking methodically. He professed concern for privacy, and described a “privacy app” that Total Information Awareness would have deployed, intended to offer some measure of protection. That said, he believed deeply in the potential of the effort he had launched, and believed just as deeply that some sacrifice of privacy would be a small price to pay. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. “Strong privacy advocates would not agree with this,” he said, “but my view is that if privacy is invaded, it only really becomes a problem if there are actions taken against the person as a result of invading that privacy. That’s not a commonly held view.” His personal opinion, he went on, was that “in today’s dangerous world,” the insistence on a right to privacy is “a luxury we probably can’t afford.”

Camp Justice

The age of Total Information Awareness is not here yet, nor is the regime imagined in Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” in which the authorities have developed the capacity to predict crimes before they happen, and make preventive arrests accordingly. In our world, justice and punishment are still mainly postcrime—mainly, but not entirely. There are times when people can legally be restrained because of fears that they represent a danger to themselves or others. There are times when people can be targeted simply because they belong to a class of persons perceived as threatening. And there are times when people can be subjected to extreme forms of interrogation, including what amounts to torture, because, it is argued, some greater harm will be prevented.