Comment by tonymet

Think about the most notorious authoritarian regimes. Third Reich, GDR , USSR, Mao's China. They had relatively weak surveillance capacity. Secret police had to personally spy on the target and manually install bugs/taps. Technology was primitive and error prone. Most casual conversations were less vulnerable to spying. Rural people were relatively safe. Private conversations could be easily held in secret (e.g. walk outside, play a record).

Also consider resourcing, the manpower, money, tools, electricity devoted to surveillance back then compared to today

How about today? Where could you venture in secret without being tracked? How could you hold a private conversation? Your face & license plates are constantly tracked, along with your personal phone, laptop , watch, fitness tracker, Tire Pressure Management Systems, etc.

If you had to assign a logarithmic authoritarian intensity scale to those regimes, and to today's regimes, how would you rank them? Consider the spying capacity, resources, recording capacity, analytic capacity.

I would put today's regimes many orders of magnitude more severe.

what do you think?