By Ethan Brooks
T
he 2006 film “The Lives of Others” depicts the banal indifference with which Stasi agents routinely pried into the lives of the inhabitants of their East German fiefdom. A poignant reminder of what of what life was like not thirty years ago in what is now a vibrant and relaxed democracy, the film gives a chilling insight into the soul-destroying impact permanent and inescapable surveillance in an all-encompassing state can have on society. This film, like the others which form Germany's silver screen catharsis of the last century's traumas, achieved its goal of generating unease, and at times disgust, over the impunity with which security services will act away from the caustic scorn of civil society. Fast forward to 2013 and we find that paranoia over the limitless reach of government into society’s private sphere and the associated abuses of power is no longer fashionable. Those who speak up for privacy and demand freedom from the state’s panoptic gaze are consigned to the fringes of political opinion as “handwringing, foil-hat clad hippies” or “foaming at the mouth libertari-
ans” of the “Tea Party” variety. So to take the long view that these windows into our notso-distant-past offer, it's remarkable that current trends of a growth in state power and encroachment, - all too visible today thanks to this summer's noisy revelations of far more extensive activities by the United States’ National Security Agency - , haven't produced a more potent outcry by civil society. This can be explained by two equally worrying factors, although they are concerning for different reasons. The first, born out of political apathy in a society unaccustomed to guarding its civil liberties, is that we simply expect the intrusion and whilst not necessarily agreeing with it, don’t see the issue as rising highly enough amongst our political priorities. In an increasingly economics-obsessed world, we do nothing but mutter to ourselves whilst glancing at the headlines. A second, more insidious reason is that we don't instinctively fear the long arm of a state we have come to automatically rely upon for so much. The knowledge that “the state,” if it is ever