German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a frank exchange of views with Barack Obama in which she compared the NSA to the Stasi. Merkel grew up in the former East Germany, where the Stasi secret police agency was a force of nearly unparalleled evil and corrosion. It’s probably not an apt comparison: the NSA’s digital wholesale spying makes the Stasi’s towers of analog filing cabinets and jars full of odors look like a quaint kindergarten playground game of Orwell-and-Seek.