Foreign Affairs - 03.2020 - 04.2020

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ANDREA KENDALLTAYLOR 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


The Digital Dictators


How Technology Strengthens Autocracy


Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and


Joseph Wright


T


he Stasi, East Germany’s state security service, may have
been one o’ the most pervasive secret police agencies that
ever existed. It was infamous for its capacity to monitor indi-

viduals and control information “ows. 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 o’ about 16
million. Its sheer manpower and resources allowed it to permeate so-


ciety and keep tabs on virtually every aspect o’ the lives o¤ East Ger-
man citizens. Thousands o’ agents worked to tap telephones, in¥ltrate
underground political movements, and report on personal and famil-
ial relationships. O¾cers were even positioned at post o¾ces 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 o’ the apparent triumph o‘ liberal democracy after the


Cold War, police states o’ this kind no longer seemed viable. Global
norms about what constituted a legitimate regime had shifted. At the
turn o’ 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 o’ a more democratic future proved naive.
Instead, new technologies now aord rulers fresh methods for pre-


serving power that in many ways rival, i’ not improve on, the Stasi’s

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