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
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