In 1991[!], shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, a former GDR leading civil rights campaigner named Bärbel Bohley uttered this warning:

“All these investigations, the thorough research into the Stasi structures, the methods with which they worked and still work, all this will fall into the wrong hands. One will examine these structures in detail – in order to then take them over. They will be adapted a little to suit a free Western society.

They won’t necessarily arrest the troublemakers either. There are more subtle ways to disarm someone. But the secret bans, the watching, the suspicion, the fear, the isolation and exclusion, the branding and muzzling of those who don’t conform – that will come back, believe me. Institutions will be created that will work much more effectively, much more finely than the Stasi. The constant lying will also come back, the disinformation, the fog in which everything loses its contour.”

Quote (in German) found here.