Celebrity Stasi

“Hello, and welcome to another edition of Celebrity Stasi. On tonight’s show, we illegally bugged and tapped several celebrities, followed their every movement to show you what they are really like. See stars like Gwyneth Paltrow as you’ve never seen them before, and find out what Sir Alex Ferguson thinks of football’s top brass. All that, after this break.”

You can see Endemol coming up with a format already to turn the secret surveillance of the great and good, as practised by tabloid journalists, into a Saturday night TV ratings winner.
The shock of the Guardian revelations this week about the News of the World isn’t so much what the journalists and private eyes did, but the fact that the bosses paid out to keep the dirty tricks hush-hush.
They had to because they couldn’t have their tactics exposed again, especially after one of their number had already been sent down by M’Lud only a couple of years before.
But equally, because laying bare the techniques used would only alert the suspicions of their rich and famous targets and potentially cut off the source of all their exclusives, meaning less salacious title-tattle and, perhaps, a mini-slump in sales.
Well, it’s all too late for that now. But will it end ? Will it heck, and the strange and necessarily secretive world of monitoring other people will survive and continue.
We are all used to the idea of spies. But our main notion of them centres around espionage where states try to hold a competitive advantage over others in order to neutralise any potential threats.
Spying for the sake of finding out what people say and do belongs more to the world of control freaks like Erich Mielke, the now notorious head of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi.
There is no real point to the News of the World’s spying other than to find out any information that might be worth publishing in its pages. It’s a feeling former citizens of the German Democratic Republic will be only to familiar; finding out things just so you know the thoughts and interests of people started out as a way of controlling a paternalistic state but ended up becoming a mania of its own.
The links between the two grow stronger the longer you look at them analytically. Especially when it comes to defending the tactic. The Stasi always claimed its spying on its own citizens was to defend the country and Socialism. The News of the World claims it’s all in the public interest. Both defences are quite spurious.
And the high ups denial that they knew anything about what was going on runs true whether it’s News International of the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.
“No, we never knew they were bugging people’s houses. We just told them to go out and get scoops/defend the values of our Socialist republic”, (delete as appropriate.)
The fact that it goes on underlines more than anything a rank hypocrisy about our supposed free society. There’s no doubt, come November, there will be plenty on TV about the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and how that act delivered the repressed citizens of the GDR into a world of untrammelled freedoms.
There will be more reminders of what those bad Commies did. Spying on their own people, finding out what they ate for dinner, when they went to bed, and who they were having sex with. And the lengths they went to, as well; the smell jars will be brought out at this point. Look at that, they will say, and compare their lives then to our wonderful lives where we are free to do and say as we please just when we like.
You wonder whether Sir Alex and Gwyneth feel the same way. If they feel violated in much the same manner as those spied upon by the Stasi do they not have some justification ?
Their recourse will not come through the state either. Just as East Germans who were allowed to open their Stasi files in the 1990’s found out there was little they could do about seeking redress for the impact of all the spying, so the celebrities whose mobile phones were hacked are being told not enough evidence exists to suggest crimes have been committed.
Perhaps it is because the intrusion is not by, or on behalf of, the state that such tactics are considered less serious. And maybe there is also a very strong feeling that public figures are “owned” by us and therefore this kind of thing, “goes with the territory.”
But maybe, just maybe, people will ask if it is right for the News of the World, and others, to use these tactics. And if those same people think about it long enough they might get down to asking, “Who might be watching me ?”