I remember Soviet block dissidents being assigned a 24/7 surveillance detail to monitor all their moves and contacts. I remember Soviet dissidents having their

I remember Soviet block dissidents being assigned a 24/7 surveillance detail to monitor all their moves and contacts. I remember Soviet dissidents having their correspondence systematically violated by the surveillance apparatus. I remember US funded Radio Free Europe (and British BBC International) being utterly revolted by this state of affairs. Human Rights, Freedom, Democracy, Constitution, Rule of Law, Dignity. Exhibit A on why the Soviets were morally corrupt and had to go to the dustbin of history. Fortunately for the Soviet subjects, in-person surveillance was expensive and didn't scale once the system started to crack and the number of dissidents increased from a handful to thousands. Not so in the tech utopia. We have multiple megacorporations competing in doing every evil trick in the Soviet surveillance textbook, 24/7, at scale. Aaah, progress.