We don't live in East Germany. We're supposed to be living in democracies where our governments act in our best interests, and our rights are not for sale.

They had this surveillance, on a far greater scale

This is a mentally-ill level of ignorance. The KGB or Gestapo couldn't even dream of the surveillance state Western capitalism has already built. They didn't have tracking devices and microphones in the pockets of most adults on Earth. They didn't capture millions of data points about all of their daily lives. They didn't have billion dollar economies structured around the capture and sale of that data. They didn't have the ability to flag dissidents or resistance autonomously, in real-time based on statistical modeling, or the capability to execute everyone they flag as opposition with cheap fully-autonomous drones. This is called turnkey-totalitarianism. All the tools have already been built. The only thing a tyrant needs to do is turn the key.

Either educate yourself about the world or keep your ignorance to yourself. Your opinion is currently worthless.

This is just one small step in the multi-decade implementation of mass surveillance.

"In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

"We're already scanning all of your files for X. Why don't we also scan them for all other crimes, A-Z?"

Statistical models and inference are mathematically guaranteed to have false positives and false negatives. False positives in this context mean entirely innocent people will be flagged and scrutinised, and have their private data shared, or potentially be investigated, when they have done nothing wrong at all. If fingerprints are one in a 1 million, and you have a database of a billion people, on average you'll implicate ~1000 innocent people every time you run a print. That's how you end up with millions of people on a watchlist. It's criminally incompetent, at best.