In Which Neil deGrasse Tyson Equates US Surveillance to “the Soviet KGB”
The Soviet KGB would have admired all the ways America — land of the free — now conducts surveillance on its own citizens.— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) May 8, 2014
ScreenshotH/T Alouette.
Monument to victims of KGB / NKVD operations in Vilnius, LithuaniaKGB, an initialism for Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), translated in English as Committee for State Security), was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its collapse in 1991. Formed in 1954 as a direct successor of such preceding agencies as Cheka, NKGB, and MGB, the committee was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of “union-republican jurisdiction”, acting as internal security, intelligence, and secret police. Similar agencies were instated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from Russia and consisted of many ministries, state committees, and state commissions.
Memorials to victims of the KGB have been set up in several countries that were formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, often in former KGB prisons, to document the repressions of the Soviet secret police and to commemorate its victims. Some are in the form of monuments at the location of KGB prisons or execution sites, others are museums and documentation centres.
