A plastic flowerpot, a hand-carved wooden birdhouse, a man's jacket with a buttonhole opening, a shoebox, and an ordinary looking handbag – what do these various artifacts have in common? They are objects scattered throughout exhibit cases located at the former Stasi headquarters, now a museum. They seem to randomly decorate the real message of the exhibit as bizarre objects. The real message lies in the plaques on the walls – the story of the storming of the Stasi fortress, the suppression of dissidents, the persecution of the Jehovah's Witnesses, violations of civil rights, and so on.

The artifacts are not integrated into the story line as tools used to spy on these victims. Rather than being examples of the Stasi's inventiveness or use of technology, these objects, and other similar ones, such as bugging devices, are all curiosities meant to reflect Stasi perversity. Upon closer inspection, all the ordinary objects on exhibit share something in common: they all have cameras hidden inside and are in reality a disguise for secret photography.

Like the agent spy cameras, most of the observation cameras were destroyed shortly after the fall of the Wall. Stasi staff members drove trucks to Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and loaded them with valuable West German Robot cameras, Swiss Tessinas, Soviet F 21's, and Stasi-designed silent 35 mm cameras, as well as the document cameras like the Minoxes, mikrats, and the technological wonders made at Carl Zeiss Jena. The truck drivers then drove off and presumably destroyed the artifacts in dumpsters.