In the past years there has been a lot of discussion on the topic of state sponsored surveillance. But hardly any material can be accessed to support the general debate due to vaguely declared security concerns. So we are debating Big Brother with little knowledge about what he actually sees, while he is watching. Over the course of three years, I was able to research the archives left by East Germany's Stasi to look for visual memories of this notorious surveillance system and more recently I was invited to spend some weeks looking at the archive by the Czechoslovak StB. Illustrating with images I have found during my research, I would like to address the question why this material is still relevant – even 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.