One thing that’s interesting on joining the cyber industry is that since it deals in the invisible and ephemeral, we don’t have a lot of physical artefacts to explain our mission and heritage.
To understand and help make our threat actor opponents “more real” it’s interesting to look at who they were, how were they recruited and trained, what animates them? Here’s a small selection of items from the Stasi that speak to aspects of this.
Stasi chief Erich Mielke killed a Police sergeant in 1931 but went on to be chief of intel for over thirty years to 1989. The cheesy wooden stein is from his office.
His head of foreign intelligence Markus Wolf “the man with no face” was rarely pictured but apparently had a sense of humour.
These beer mats were designed by him and feature cats in “hear no evil” poses or releasing bugs (get it?) from a box.
The badges are from KGB and Stasi technical colleges, and the EhrenTeller (honorary award plate) is from a 1973 graduate of the Stasi’s Juristiche Hochschule (legal college) at Potsdam.
There they learned a version of law that told them shooting escapees at the border was OK, and you could secretly try and jail people.
A highly technically sophisticated but ruthlessly authoritarian regime is a warning from history. And as cyber people, we should also be mindful that much of the tech we create and administer is “dual use” capable for state surveillance.
#cybersecurity #espionage #coldwar #spycraft #vintageespionage
Dan Gillmor
