I love the German language :P Too bad we learn french instead of german in my educational direction.

From what I know, torture was never a big part of the Stasi activities. I've hardly ever even heard claims about the Stasi torturing people. But since you made me wonder, I just looked it up on Wikipedia - the english page mentions torture just once, claiming that by the 1970 they stopped all such activities, because they were considered "too crude". And even the quite extensive german page mentions torture just once, saying that by 1956 they considered stopping all such activities.

So despite the fact that they may have tortured, especially in the beginning, torture is not what the Stasi was infamous for. When people nowadays hear "torture", I'm sure even 95% of former east germans would rather think of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib etc. than the Stasi.

Sure. The Stasi had just one billionth the amount of information that the NSA collects in one single data center - but the quality of that information was very high, the information was condensed.

But this is not about claiming that the NSA being as worse or even worse than the Stasi anyway. You cannot really compare the two anyway - the NSA is just once of about 15 intelligence services in the USA, each having a specific agenda, while the Stasi was one big national all-in-one agency that was responsible for just everything.

But the sheer amount of data the NSA collects is just incredible I think. Can you even imagine an area twice the size of the USA, the complete surface being covered with full filing drawers? I can't... That's just... so much data!

Well, it was mostly psychological torture inside of their prisons, but still. Also, I think the absolute distrust you had to harbor towards everyone because they might be an IM among other things probably could count as psychological torture as well. People start to have a bad feeling towards the NSA, but it is nowhere near the level of the stasi.

You're still comparing the NSA and the Stasi as a whole, which in my opinion makes no sense. The NSA is just one intelligence service with a very limited scope, and probably doesn't even run own prisons. If the NSA thinks someone should be sent to some secret prison, tortured in Guantanamo or wherever, I'd guess they inform some other department and don't do it themselves.

The Stasi on the other hand was one single huge national agency, so they did what in the USA 15 seperate intelligence services are doing.

I consider that a rather "creative" definition of "torture", but anyway - are you now referring to the Stasi, the NSA, or both? Because that sentence is probably true for just any intelligence service.

its not fair to put the nsa on the same level withthe nsa
As the stasi was transparent and hoenest compared to the nsa .
People knew who and how the Stasi works and that they 've been fuked by the Stasi but the NSA fuks people twice as hard and pretend that they don't do this.
If you wanna compare the nsa than with the kgb as the stasi was just a minion of the kgb.Also the stasi was small and not operating world wide in that massive way(microsoft,google,facebook,apple and i guess amazon)
Combined with the "see something say something" campaign in the usa ,the fema camps and the ndaa infinite detention law the it all looks very similar to east germany-the difference :east germany was not the lackey of anglo saxonbankers and corporations but the lackey of the ussr.

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.

Well it's really just a visual representation of just how much the information age has changed things.  I wouldn't be shocked if my home PC has the Stasi beat.

Easy to check since they're giving the numbers used in the calculations: 48000 filing cabinets, for each of which they assume 120MB, so they assumed 120*48000 =  5.76 Terabytes for the Stasi archives.

I'm lost here, it would be more acceptable if the torture is not against common US citizens, or if the torture is on small scale. Not saying that the NSA tortures people, just that I'm curious about your statement.