The Labour MP Chris Bryant suggested in his speech during the Commons phone hacking debate on Wednesday that the News of the World and the Metropolitan Police might be shredding evidence as he spoke. Upon hearing this, I realised there are a number of similarities between the now doomed newspaper and the East German Ministry of State Security.
Most obviously, both organisations listened in on their target's phones. The NotW used private investigators to hack voicemail messages and gather details on a wide range of British citizens more salacious and embarrassing than it was reckoned could have been otherwise obtained. The Stasi plumped for the more traditional practice of phone tapping - admittedly on an even bigger scale - to build up a vast portfolio on the lives and transgressions of the people of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Other methods of information gathering included covert photography (not entirely alien to the NotW) and the examination of all mail.
The eyes and ears of the Stasi were inescapable from its formation in 1950 until the fall of the Berlin wall, and the East German government relied on this mass surveillance of the population to exercise control. Likewise, we are still learning the true extent of phone hacking by investigators in the pay of NotW. First, it affected just a handful of celebrities. But slowly the pool of known targets has grown and might now incorporate 4,000 politicians, sportspeople, police officers, families of murder victims, royals: almost anybody who has been in the public eye at some time or other seem to have been treated as fair game. The idea that the systematic circumvention of notions of privacy need not be off limits in the pursuit of what the spies deemed the greater good comes across in both cases.
The comparisons don't end there. The organisations are strikingly similar in terms of leadership. The Chairman and CEO of News Corporation - which ultimately owns NotW - and all-round media mogul Rupert Murdoch is 80. Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi between 1957 and 1989, was 81 in the year the wall fell. Mielke's namesake Erich Honecker was General Secretary of the GDR's ruling and only political party in that year, and only a few years fresher at 77. These men also share the characteristic of frequently having gotten their own way when it comes to elections. Claims to democracy in the GDR's very name were a sham, with dissent from the one-party model frequently resulting in imprisonment, and elections being fixed. Rupert Murdoch hasn't engaged in anything quite so dire but it is accepted that the support of the numerous print titles of the man Forbes called 13th most powerful in the world can do wonders for an election campaign.
Bryant's urging that a public inquiry be set up immediately and documents be seized from NotW or the Met to stop them being shredded brings to mind the dying days of the Stasi. When it became clear that the East German people had had enough of being repressed by their own government and demonstrated for freedom in their tens and hundreds of thousands, the Stasi realised the race was on to destroy as many as they could of their files on the populace. Officials were forced to go and buy new shredders after the others were burnt out through overuse. Any such action by NotW would represent a striking similarity - the frantic destruction of evidence of mass surveillance after people eventually had the courage to speak out. Indeed the news that the NotW is to print its last edition this weekend only extends the metaphor. While it is the politicians who have finally found their voice in recent days on the back of media revelations, another shameful comparison is the political involvement in both regimes.
In 1989 the East German people stormed the Stasi offices in Berlin to find out what information was held on them. With the reunification, the building was preserved and turned into a museum, and the archives made available to those who wanted to see them. To this day the German government employs thousands of people to carry out the arduous task of sorting out the information. Is something similar happening at Wapping?