If You're Innocent...

Guardian article

“It was his metadata. It was who he called. It was the fact that he was a political activist. That he used encryption techniques – this was seen as highly suspicious. That sometimes he would go out and not take his cellphone with him… ”

He was freed three weeks later after an international outcry, but the episode has left its marks. “Even in the bathroom, I’d be wondering: is there a camera in here?”

[...]

It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. “Not knowing whether I’m in a private place or not.” Not knowing if someone’s watching or not. Though she’s under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist “hard but not impossible”. It’s on a personal level that it’s harder to process. “I try not to let it get inside my head, but… I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure I’m having a private conversation or something, I’ll go outside.”

[...]

Poitras’s experience of understanding the sensation of what it’s like to know you’re being watched, or not to know but feel a prickle on the back of your neck and suspect you might be, is far from unique, it turns out. But then, perhaps more than any other city on earth, Berlin has a radar for surveillance and the dark places it can lead to.

  The Guardian

Right where they want us all to be. So then we’ll self-censor, and make it possible, if improbable, for them to control everyone.

“As soon as you start to censor yourself,” Domscheit-Berg tells me, “then you leave the path of free speech. So many people now do this in Berlin. They avoid certain expressions. When we have meetings they leave their phones in different rooms. You have already lost your freedom.”

Have I already lost mine? Has it affected my online behaviour? Possibly. My thoughts have always flowed seamlessly from my brain to my fingers to Google’s all-knowing rectangular white box. And now? There’s the briefest pause. A hesitancy. It’s not exactly an iron curtain but it’s not nothing either. I’m being watched. But then, you are too. And, if you think it doesn’t matter, go to Berlin. Go to the Stasi museum. See how it all panned out last time around.