From Communist Dossier to Facebook: Life Under Surveillance

“Did you see that your grandmother went viral on Albanian Facebook?” a relative texted me. “Everyone is talking about that photo.”

An old black-and-white photo was posted on social media by someone I’ve never met or heard of. A young, glamorous couple stares into the camera, relaxed on deck chairs outside a luxury hotel. In the background, a pair of skis lean against the wall. Her broad smile and slightly pensive expression contrast with the more serious, penetrating gaze of the man sprawled next to her. On the side table is a pack of cigarettes, and beneath it is a paper bag, classy but inconspicuous. The name on it is barely visible: “Hotel Vittoria.”

It didn’t take me long to recognize my grandparents in the photo. Judging by their winter clothes, the name of the hotel, and the skis in the background, it was taken during their honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Italian Alps. The year was 1941. My grandmother often spoke fondly of those ten days in the Dolomites. “I felt like the happiest person in the world,” she would say, “and Cortina was the happiest place in the world.” Yes, indeed, she would insist, even though it was Italy, and even though it was the winter of 1941.

I often wondered what she was thinking. Operation Barbarossa in the Soviet Union, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the partisan resistance in Yugoslavia, all of which filled the headlines just as she was learning to ski, enjoying the crisp winter air. Was she indifferent to the most brutal battles of the most brutal war humanity has ever known? Or was it one of those tricks of memory, when the reconstruction of the past depends not so much on the experience itself at that moment as on the way it is shaped by later trauma?

Unfortunately, there was nothing to search for: all our family records disappeared five years after that photo was taken, “when the police came and took everything away,” as my grandmother would say.

My grandmother, Leman Ipi, was born in Leskovik, Thessaloniki in 1918 to an elite Ottoman-Albanian family. Once a sprawling cosmopolitan center, where Muslims like her lived peacefully alongside Sephardic Jews, Christians, and atheists, the city she grew up in was undergoing rapid, if not always welcome, change. The fall of the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires was accompanied by the rise of protectionism and nationalism, while minorities were increasingly used as political weapons.

To escape all this, at the age of 18 she decided to move to Albania on her own. It was around this time that she met my grandfather, a law graduate from the Sorbonne, the son of a prominent Albanian fascist politician and also a socialist who was sympathetic to Leon Blum and supported the French Popular Front. They married in 1941. After the war ended in 1946, her husband - my grandfather - was arrested by the communist authorities in Albania, charged with agitation and propaganda, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A year later, the security department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania opened a file on Leman. She was placed under surveillance, suspected of being a Greek spy. Now the sole guardian of her young son, she was also sent to work on a collective farm. She visited her husband in prison twice a year, until his release in the early 1960s. Four times a year, she was summoned to the security offices, with the offer to become an informant.

These were the facts of her life that were familiar to me when that photo of my grandparents appeared on social media. At first, I didn't think it was strange that she was there, I was overwhelmed by the contrast between how I imagined those scenes from the Hotel Vittoria and how the couple actually looked in the photo.

But then the trolls showed up. Is this woman here related to Lea Ipi, the academic who is allegedly being paid by Soros to bring woke philosophy to Albania? “That’s her grandmother,” one user clarified. “She was a fascist spy.” “No, not fascist, but communist,” another jumped in to clarify. “Actually, she was both,” a third chimed in.

“There is something in the human spirit,” my grandmother would say, “that resists all attempts at insult, injury, or humiliation—something that other species are incapable of, because they are unable to think beyond their immediate existence. We call it dignity. It was a concept through which she seemed to find a way to come to terms with all the ups and downs of her life—the one thing she believed could be grasped even in the depths of great tragedy. “We have lost everything,” she would often say, “but we have not lost our dignity, because dignity has nothing to do with money, honor, or titles. It is about doing what is right.”

And then she could still speak for herself. Faced with those online posts, I realized that in death she was powerless, unable to protect her name. I could read those comments and decide whether to respond or ignore them, whether to engage in a discussion or report the content. I could block users or look away; I could, of course, advocate for stricter regulation. She, however, was condemned to silence. In that post, a caricature of herself emerged, devoid of context, memory, evidence, or even the basic affection we show strangers when we meet them in person. I felt I had to act. And I could only think of one way. Find the truth. Go back to the source.

That source, it turned out, was called the “Directorate for Information on Documents of the Former State Security Service” - in other words, an archive that kept files on the surveillance of victims of communism in Albania.

There is something in the human spirit, my grandmother would say, that resists all attempts at insult, injury, or humiliation - something that other species are incapable of, because they are unable to think beyond their immediate existence. We call it dignity.

I had always imagined my visits to the archives as if I were inspecting a battlefield after a battle: a grim, dark labyrinth that smelled of death and mold, with piles of papers strewn across the concrete floors like bodies waiting to be buried. Instead, I found myself in a place that looked like a cross between an Ikea store and a hospital waiting room. The symmetry of the furniture reminded me of the stark simplicity of the lines in Mondrian’s works. Employees in immaculate white uniforms resembling surgical gowns greeted me at the entrance: it turned out that only they were allowed to enter the basement where the original documents were kept. I was only allowed access to the digital copies.

As for the content of the files, they were often tedious. Long lists of streets, followed by the time when the “object” was located, like some early version of Google Maps. For example: “Surveillance began at 14.30:19 p.m., 2/1952/42, at Bardhyl Street, No. 28. The object left the house at the stated time and moved along Bardhyl, Qemal Stafa, Barricades, XNUMX November, Hamdi Mezezi and Hamdi Toptani Streets.”

More exciting were the pseudonyms of the associates who spied on my grandmother - not so different from the usernames of her internet trolls: Red Cap, Pliers, Gear, Revolver, Willow Branch, Storm, March Wind, Tribune.

I sometimes felt guilty that, as I began to read, I had lost interest in my grandmother's life. Instead, I wondered whether, and which of my descendants, would one day search through the vast collection of information about me on the Internet. The communist authorities could only dream of such a great development of productive forces.

In the files, my grandmother was described as an “object.” There is something paradoxical about the fact that an object is simultaneously perceived as a threat. An object is never autonomous; it always requires a subject to direct it. My grandmother could direct herself, and they (the spies, the Party, the Politburo) were afraid of the direction she might take. They controlled her, but she somehow controlled them: they existed because she existed; they were determined in opposition to her. It was a kind of master-slave dialectic based on recognition. Two independent, self-conscious actors were drawn into a life-and-death struggle, pushing themselves to the limit and discovering that each of them’s truth lay in the other.

As I delved deeper into the system that tracked my grandmother’s habits, I began to wonder more and more about the one that tracked mine. Paradoxically, what once stood out as one of the most dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century totalitarian regimes—their penchant for spying on their citizens and collecting data on their daily habits—is now fully normalized, even celebrated, in societies that have made data collection a fundamental element not only of national security but also of the functioning of their economies.

Of course, acknowledging the significant overlaps between old and new forms of surveillance does not mean viewing them as equally harmful. It would be a mockery of my grandmother's suffering to pretend that I am a victim like her. I do not have to belong to a suspect category, as she did, nor to be seen as a threat to the system. There is no dialectic of recognition.

The capitalist system that shapes my existence not only relies on surveillance, but is structured by it. It is interested not only in behavior that is perceived as deviant, but also in what is considered normal. Our lives, the lives of not only suspicious citizens, are the sum of all the choices that on the surface seem aligned with our true interests, but in reality rest on the greatest, most persistent, and most pervasive manipulation of preferences that humanity has ever experienced. From food to personal appearance, from vacation to health, from news to conversations with friends - everything is monitored, selected, ranked, exchanged, traded, and then offered to us again by alienated forces beyond our control.

What once stood out as one of the most dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century totalitarian regimes - their penchant for spying on their citizens and collecting data on their daily habits - is now fully normalized, even celebrated, in societies that have made data collection a fundamental element not only of national security, but also of the functioning of their economies.

As I tried to piece together my grandmother’s life and the unlikely parallels between surveillance then and now, I began to see how these scattered fragments always returned to the same central principle: dignity. A concept now recognized as the core of contemporary human rights discourse, dignity occupies a prominent place in national constitutions and international treaties, in part due to its universal normative appeal, irreducible to any particular ideology, religious belief, or cultural identity.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by affirming that “recognition of the inherent dignity … of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Article 1 of the German Grundgesetz also emphasizes: “Human dignity is inviolable. It is the duty of every public authority to respect and protect it.”

These statements have as much to do with the tragic breakdown of the rule of law during the Nazi period as with the need to place morality at the very center of legality after World War II. However, philosophically, this attempt owes much to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's reflections on the rational capacity of man for autonomous self-direction. Distinguishing that which has a price and is therefore fungible from that which possesses an intrinsic value that cannot be compared to anything else, Kant argued that rational beings have dignity because they are capable of treating one another not only as means but also as ends in themselves.

Returning to the philosophical core of this idea helps us understand why the moral wrongness of surveillance, in both its older and newer forms, is best understood as an attack on dignity. It is reflected in the tendency toward objectification, in the reduction of people to mere instruments, resources, and data points, rather than seeing them as subjects capable of moral action. In my grandmother’s case, that attack came from above, from a government that used deceptive means to undermine her autonomy. To spy on her life, the Party relied on the coercive power of the state.

In most cases of modern surveillance, there is no direct coercion, at least if we exclude cybercrime and military espionage. The perspective is anonymous, impersonal. Obstacles to moral action appear horizontally, dispersed across platforms and infrastructures, which operate without faces or names. Today's surveillance is based not on reports, but on digital traces; it does not require loyalty to the Party, but only the willingness to participate in a game from which someone derives profit.

And yet the harm is dynamic: it can escalate. Imagine those denied employment because their employers scrutinized their social media activity. Imagine potential immigrants denied visas because increasingly paranoid governments buy private data to restrict entry to certain groups. Imagine the use of facial recognition technology and body cameras in criminal prosecutions of civil society protests, from environmental to anti-war. Imagine the use of drones to target journalists trying to document war crimes. In each of these cases, the boundaries between old and new reveal a disturbing continuity.

Twelve archives, five countries, and thousands of pages later, my research into the facts of my grandmother’s life has yielded rather disappointing results. In Albania, I was told that secret service files are often unreliable, with spies either fabricating information to have something to report or self-censoring out of sympathy for their “objects.” In Greece, I discovered that much of the evidence of Ottoman life in Thessaloniki had been lost in the early efforts of the Greek authorities to Hellenize the city. In Italy, surprisingly, it was very difficult to find information about women. In France, however, small bureaucratic errors often led to larger ones.

In the end, the most fascinating aspect of the search was not about the facts of my grandmother's life, but about reconstructing the world that led to her disintegration. The politics of the 1930s, up until the start of World War II, was one of "separating nations," as Lord Curzon famously put it—the destruction of multicultural coexistence, not too dissimilar to the nationalist projects of today.

It was a policy in which international institutions like the League of Nations failed to promote cooperation in trade and security. It was a policy in which the left abandoned internationalism (the Spanish Civil War was its swan song) and became increasingly attached to the nation-state, with all the compromises that entailed. It was a policy in which the collapse of empires produced the “minority question” in international law, first as a mere question, then as a perceived threat, then through the search for scapegoats among different ethnic, religious, or cultural groups, and finally through full-blown fascism.

Amidst all this, nationalists, liberals, conservatives, socialists, Christians, Muslims, and Jews constantly invoked the idea that we would today describe as “the dignity of the people.”

Perhaps the point of learning from the past is not so much to discover lost truths, but to understand historical patterns that help us see through the lies of the present. How can we speak of dignity in a time like ours, in which genocide, war, exploitation, racism, sexism, and homophobia survive thanks to an economic system that constantly manipulates lives? What is dignity in the face of algorithmic mediation, seemingly harmless tracking of behavioral patterns on the internet, and the application of surveillance technologies in all their more or less harmless forms?

It is not obvious that dignity can be fully protected today from abuses by either states or corporations, despite its central role in human rights. It is certainly not to be found in conservative nostalgia for national tradition, nor in liberal lamentations over the collapse of once progressive norms. Perhaps it survives in the active effort, both personal and political, to remain morally vigilant, to preserve human integrity in a world that seems to be working together against it.

But perhaps that is the ultimate meaning of the search for truth in historical facts: to look at the past with an eye toward the futures we wish to avoid and the ones we hope to create.

The author is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics.

The essay was published in the Financial Times.

Translated and edited by: A. Š.