Until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the East German state security service – the Stasi – conducted surveillance and kept files on a third of the country’s population. One of those people was activist and dissident Ulrike Poppe, whose communications and activities were spied on by Stasi operatives constantly for 15 years.

Much of the data that is contained in Poppe’s Stasi files, compiled during the Cold War, would today be considered “telecommunications metadata”. From locations, movements and meetings to relationships, affiliations and associates. Phone calls made and letters sent, as well as newspapers read and movies watched. During the Stasi’s reign, this type of intelligence was the product of covert bugs and undercover spies, a hugely intensive task that kept theirs 91,000 staff busy.

Today it can be easily gleaned from the mass aggregation and retention of data collected and processed by the telecommunications companies that facilitate almost every interaction, communication and action we make. This should raise particular concerns for Australians amid the federal government’s push for two year mandatory data retention. Modern-day Stasi files can be easily created by aggregating and analysing this metadata, which can then be indexed, linked to other databases, and retained for long periods of time at relatively little cost and hassle to the government and the telecommunications companies that they co-opt.

Just like the spying perpetrated by the Stasi, metadata retention is a form of surveillance that is unacceptable in a democratic country. Not only does it dispense with long-held notions that individuals are innocent until proven guilty, and that curtailment of civil liberties must be preceded by a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, it also undermines progressive thought, innovation and political diversity. It suppresses any potential challenge to the status quo. It reinforces the power of those doing the spying, and renders impotent the spied upon.

Current day Germans, particularly those of East German origins, know well that one of the first steps towards an authoritarian state is the extension of the state’s power to monitor its citizens. It was for this reason that, little more than a year after data retention became part of European law in 2008, the German constitutional court ruled the practice unconstitutional.

In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the mass surveillance of the US, UK and Australia it has been Germans who have taken to the streets in protest, and the German government has not only instituted a parliamentary inquiry into the actions of NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes, but has led the United Nations general assembly to adopt a resolution condemning mass surveillance and reinforcing the importance of the right to privacy in the digital age.

Germany is not the only country to recognise the destructive effects of data retention. In April 2014, the court of justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidated the European Data Retention Directive, removing the legal basis for data retention laws in countries across the EU. The court was unequivocal in its finding that the mass collection of metadata is an interference with the right to privacy, and access to this data cannot be justified under vague references to combating serious crimes or terrorism. If access to this sensitive data is granted, such access must be subject to prior review “carried out by a court or by an independent administrative body”.

No doubt the court was in part informed by the lingering memory of the critical role that mass surveillance played in 20th century fascist and totalitarian regimes across Europe. However, the CJEU’s decision represents an important acknowledgement invasive qualities of telecommunications metadata in what we are still, quaintly, calling “the digital age”.

Blanket data retention is no less than state-sanctioned mass surveillance. As a country of immigrants, many of whom came to this land seeking a fairer, more democratic society, Australia would do well to recall that democracy does not easily flourish when governments employ mass surveillance in the name of protecting national security.

The Stasi collected 40 binders - somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000 pages – on Poppe over 15 years. In 2010, Austrian Max Schrems made an access request to Facebook, asking the internet giant to provide him with a copy of all data collected by the company about Schrems since he joined in 2008. He received 1,222 pages relating to his activity on the site over a three year period, including information Schrems believed he had deleted from the site.

One need only consider the many other internet services all Australians use, and the many telecommunications providers who facilitate those individuals’ access to internet services, in order to get a sense of how much metadata exists, and what exactly it might reveal about them. The Stasi’s files pale in comparison.