The Clever Cameras Used by the East German Stasi to Spy on Citizens

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The Clever Cameras Used by the East German Stasi to Spy on Citizens
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The German Stasi would spy on its own citizens over decades using all sorts of fascinating imaging equipment.

East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic , was one of the most tightly-controlled police states in recent memory from 1949 to 1990 that would spy on its own citizens throughout using all sorts of fThe Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi by its German acronym, was a fierce and shadowy secret police intent on keeping the Socialist Unity Party in power as a one-party communist state during the Cold War.

The stats are staggering unto themselves. At its peak, the Stasi employed 91,000 people, meaning one-in-30 GDR citizens were agents, while over five million were under suspicion or surveillance. Another 500,000 informants, either regulars or occasional, supplied information about anyone and everyone at one point or another.

Several are, however, like the French Beaulieu R16 movie camera, which was rejigged to use a pinhole lens and mirror to surveil a room, where they would’ve drilled into the wall to cut a hole just one millimeter wide on the other side to see everything by adjusting the mirror based on which part of the room to focus on.There was the F-21, a Soviet miniature camera manufactured for the KGB starting in the 1950s.

The SLRs were key for agents because there were plenty of interchangeable lenses capable of following a subject from further away without sacrificing quality. Their ubiquity among the population also made it easier for agents to blend in as tourists or working photographers, since there was nothing unusual about how the cameras looked or what they did. Stasi agents also used that kind of approach when on assignment abroad, especially in Western Europe.

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