| Mr Khan said: The comparison doesn't really work, with the Stasi operating in a smaller territory in the pre-information age. |
The comparison works perfectly fine, as long as one is capable of understanding what's being compared. The comparison says absolutely nothing about how "evil" both services are/were, as some here seem to believe (at least that's my impression, considering that it seems to be mainly US americans in this thread unwilling to take the comparison for what it is, and instead seem to switch their brain to some kind of "patriotic defense autopilot mode" - sure, the title of page, "Stasi vs. NSA" is on purpose meant to draw attention by being kind of provocative, but the rest of the page makes perfectly clear what the comparison is all about).
Instead, it's rather like a graphical comparison between the amount of information stored in a book, like the bible, with the amount of information stored on, say, a DVD. It's rather like a visual comparison of how effective collecting information became over the last 25 years, with the help of modern technology: One seventh the number of employees collecting one billion times the amount of information.
