The extent of Stasi surveillance and repression was profound and explains why Germans take privacy more seriously than other Western democracies.

It's scary to imagine what the Stasi would have been able to accomplish with today's surveillance technology. The article shows how their bugging was limiting by budget and by the human resources required to covertly insert recording devices. Since then, every aspect of surveillance has become easier, stealthier, and cheaper to deploy at scale. End-to-end encryption has been the main countermeasure, but can be worked around, since the metadata of a conversation tends to be more significant than the contents.