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99 Foreign Aff. 103 (2020)
The Digital Dictators: How Technology Strengthens Autocracy

handle is hein.journals/fora99 and id is 313 raw text is: The Digital Dictators How Technology Strengthens Autocracy Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright The Stasi, East Germany's state security service, may have been one of the most pervasive secret police agencies that ever existed. It was infamous for its capacity to monitor indi- viduals and control information flows. By 1989, it had almost 100,000 regular employees and, according to some accounts, between 500,000 and two million informants in a country with a population of about 16 million. Its sheer manpower and resources allowed it to permeate so- ciety and keep tabs on virtually every aspect of the lives of East Ger- man citizens. Thousands of agents worked to tap telephones, infiltrate underground political movements, and report on personal and famil- ial relationships. Officers were even positioned at post offices to open letters and packages entering from or heading to noncommunist countries. For decades, the Stasi was a model for how a highly capable authoritarian regime could use repression to maintain control. In the wake of the apparent triumph of liberal democracy after the Cold War, police states of this kind no longer seemed viable. Global norms about what constituted a legitimate regime had shifted. At the turn of the millennium, new technologies, including the Internet and the cell phone, promised to empower citizens, allowing individuals greater access to information and the possibility to make new connec- tions and build new communities. But this wishful vision of a more democratic future proved naive. Instead, new technologies now afford rulers fresh methods for pre- serving power that in many ways rival, if not improve on, the Stasi's ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. ERICA FRANTZ is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. JOSEPH WRIGHT is Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. March/April 2020 103