Who's watching? A Facebook-Cambridge Analytica style snoop on celluloid

An Oscar-winning German shows how compromised privacy, like in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica case, affects the lives of people

In a scene towards the end of the 2006 German film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) discovers that had been under constant state surveillance as a citizen of East Germany in the mid-1980s. For any surveillance to be effective, of course, the subject must remain blissfully unaware of it, and so was Dreyman until he is informed of it – long after the fall of the Berlin Wall – by a former minister of the socialist German Democratic Republic. Returning home, Dreyman pulls out the wires and microphones concealed in his walls and used the Stasi to eavesdrop on him.

Later, at the Stasi Records Agency, he is stunned to discover thick files, with closely typed paged, that the secret police maintained on him, detailing every aspect of his life: What he ate and drank, what he told his friends, who came to see him, when he had sex with his wife. Of course, at the beginning of the film, we are told: “The population of GDR is kept under strict control by the Stasi… Its force of 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers safeguards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Its declared goal: ‘To know everything’.”

The exposé published last weekend by The Observer on how British data analytics and political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica used personality profiling of 50 million Facebook users – without their consent – to micro-target US President Donald Trump’s election campaign as well as the Brexit campaign. The company, whose services have also been allegedly used by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, also used the data they mined to discredit candidates in poll campaigns, thereby influencing results in way that are not yet fully known. This has thrown open the global debate on privacy, with many erstwhile sceptics now batting for stricter laws – such as the European one which comes into effect next month – on how private and government agency use data of individuals. As Business Standard columnist Claude Smadja argued on Friday, “data is to 21st century economy what oil was to 20th century economy and is being weighed in gold”.

States have, of course, always used surveillance – which is after all nothing but another form of data collection – to control citizens. Be it Stalinist Soviet Union, where even the slightest careless remark could land one in the Gulag for decades, or democratic United States under the paranoid sway of Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities that presumed people to be communists unless they were able to prove otherwise. In more recent times, too, the National Security Agency of the US had been accused of global surveillance programmes, with the cooperation of European telecommunication companies. And, in India, privacy advocates have raised serious concerns about the government’s Aadhaar programme, after a series of revelations of how sensitive data of citizens who registered for it could be breached. It is not without reason that Das Leben der Anderen is set in 1984; this is a subtle hint to George Orwell’s novel 1984, a stringent critique of Bolshevik Russia that popularised the phrase: “Big Brother Is Watching”.

But what do states, and now multinational companies, do with the data they meticulously collect? In the film, which bagged an Oscar besides other prizes, the surveillance programme on Dreyman is initiated because the minister of culture, Bruno Hempf (Thoman Thieme) covets his wife, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedek). The Stasi put their best man, Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), on the job. While Hempf manages to force Sieland to have sex with him, taking advantage of her addiction to prescription drugs, the Stasi make little progress on their mission to find any dirt on Dreyman. He is, as we learn, a devoted socialist.

At least, until the suicide of his friend, blacklisted theatre director Alberta Jerska, which prompts Dreyman to write an anonymous article on the spiralling suicide rates in East Germany for Der Spiegel. The enraged East German authorities launch a manhunt to find out the writer but is unable to link the article to Dreyman. This is because Wiesler, fully aware of it, protects him. He, too, has grown disillusioned with the regime and sympathetic towards the playwright.

Discussing how he conceptualised the film, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck told The New York Times: “I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening in to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him.” The piece of music that moves Wiesler is Beethoven’s Sonata for a Good Man. Wiesler is depicted to be the perfect picture of soulless bureaucracy, wearing monochromatic greys or browns, with a receding hairline. His outstanding qualities, at least according to his superiors, are meticulousness and doggedness. Yet, this same man is moved by music, is sensitive to the motivations of an artist, and turns into an artist himself, authoring the detailed false reports of Dreyman’s activities that he submits to the Stasi.

Donnersmarck wasn’t allowed to shoot at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, formerly a dreaded Stasi prison because its director Hubertus Knabe objected to the portrayal of a Stasi man as a hero. When Donnersmarck cited Schindler’s List in his defence, Knabe reportedly said: “There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler.” This assessment, however, is a tad too pessimistic. Barely seven years after this film, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and contractor of the US government, revealed to journalists an unauthorised NSA surveillance programme. He has since then been convicted of espionage and is living at an undisclosed location in Russia. His case is an example of how even the most well-orchestrated, Kafkaesque, machinations of governments can be compromised by a conscientious individual. The purpose of the big state is to regulate – control – the lives of others. Yet, even the most well-oiled bureaucracy comprises individuals, who are not without feelings, and some of whom will be only to happy to subvert the surveillance.