It's a good example of the actual mechanism and outcomes of the propaganda used against Americans and other westerners. The actual facts of what the Stasi was and how it operated are pretty analogous to the FBI in the US, and to other semi-secret national police outfits in other countries. They were shitty, thuggish cops who constantly overreached... and their arrest rates were in the same ballpark as what the FBI did (from my understanding of the data, the FBI actually arrested *more *people per capita in 1989? The data I'm looking up is a little fuzzy). The western propaganda latches on to interesting factoids like the extensive nature of their registered informant network, and then use that to spin yarns about how "like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life", and then they put that quote on the fucking wikipedia page about them.