ZERSETZUNG: The Dark Secrets of The Surveillance State

ZERSETZUNG: What the Stasi did in East Germany, and what today's left in the USA is doing today - (with the information gleamed from social media): 

"The Stasi perfected the technique of psychological harassment of perceived enemies known as Zersetzung (pronounced [ʦɛɐ̯ˈzɛtsʊŋ]) – a term borrowed from chemistry which literally means "decomposition". ...the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. 

The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation". But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. 

The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions."