It's not even about your feeds. It's about your private messages. Crazy stuff, Gestapo and KGB wouldn't even dream of this level of surveillance of ordinary citizens.
If modern day tech had been available to the stasi they absolutely would have used it. They were already beginning to collect hair samples from people in the late 1980s in anticipation of widespread DNA testing being available 5, 10, 15 years down the road.
Scale makes a whole lot of difference. Even the Stasi, the KGB, or the FBI had to restrict such monitoring to the small fraction of the population they actually suspected. Now they don't only suspect everyone, they also have the tools to monitor everyone.
It's the difference between being able to point a gun at a few inconvenient people, and being able to point it at everybody, all the time. Eventually the temptation presented by this kind of power and control over people will intersect with some Erdogan or Lukashenko type with the finger on the trigger.
IIRC both Stasi and KGB did aim for an almost full coverage of surveillance and informants, not just limiting to a small fraction of the population. Stasi had 500000+ informants (3% or more of population) which had done monitoring, and obviously they wrote reports on much more people than that.
Similarly for KGB; I believe that standard practice was to recruit secret informants e.g. from every course group in universities, so any student activities would be fully covered and you could get a personal report about every student; for 100% of any trips abroad the group had an agent/informant or multiple within the group. So you'd have a small fraction (multiple percent?) of population actively involved in the monitoring, and a majority of people being at least occasionally monitored - as the archives later revealed, an average person should expect that your colleagues, friends and relatives will [have to] write reports on you (corroborated by the fact that any group might include two or more informants, so any omissions would be obvious and cause consequences for the false reporter) and note any expressions of anti-government sentiment.
The aim was to effectively keep a gun aimed at everyone, and they were somewhat successful in achieving that (or at least maintaining that belief) even without modern technologies.
> The aim was to effectively keep a gun aimed at everyone
The aim was to make everyone believe there may be a gun pointed at them even if there wasn't. While that was relatively effective do you know what is even more effective? Actually having a gun pointed at everyone.
Having 500k Stasi informants and spies over its 50 years of existence is a far cry from being able to effectively spy on everyone all the time. And informants are notoriously unreliable due to a whole host of human failings, not least among them being that the people want to gain favor or at least not antagonize the state.
The modern surveillance state would make you inform on yourself via every device or communication channel you use, and at all times, with some human/AI combination making sure very little if anything is missed.
What makes you think people proposing this aren't on level (or even above) with Erdogan or Lukashenko? At this point they are just better at maintaining a good image. I don't believe you can have good intentions and still want to introduce such level of mass surveillance.
I think that quite a few people in power who are pushing for this kind of stuff genuinely believe that their intentions are good, and that targeting child porn / terrorism / ... makes it justifiable.
But that makes it worse, not better - those who believe in their ideology with such zeal are more likely to push it through to the extremes, no matter what.
Why is it always "them" vs "us"? NSA/CIA are doing probably a better job at global surveillance of everything and everyone, simply based on resources available to them. Every powerful enough government spies on the largest scale they can, because just letting someone else to spy on you and not spy yourself (if you can) would be infinitely foolish.
Even at local scale. If citizens could find a way to hold their president on short leash, such president would be more likely to listen to the citizens. But citizens don't have such powers, only presidents do, so they only have to listen to each other.
Thanks to how big IT companies have tighter ties to developed countries, I wouldn't consider only these governments. Remember the list of companies who participated in PRISM were mostly (only) US-based.
> They were doing that exact thing to selected citizens
But they couldn't do it to everyone. Now with computers they can. You might think 1984 was written as a warning, but the powers that be see it as an instruction manual.
