Heh. Western? Because Russia and China and Iran and Saudia Arabia and India are exemplars of trusting their citizens.
You don't know how to fix it? Here's a start: stop grouping people into ridiculously large categories like "Westerners" or "politicians" or "terrorists". How do you think this starts?
The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information. They also do not come with a check-and-balance mechanism precisely supposed to prevent the emergence of the new Stasi we're seeing here. This not a characterization of the people living there, but a simple fact: there are a number prerequisitives in order to avoid this kind of issue. It is unfortunate that there seems to be more of them than you would think.
> So the existence of checks and frameworks make the situation worse? What?
What I'm trying to say is that, there are a lot of things to address first in authoritarian regimes before you address mass electronic surveillance. You can't get upset that a plane does not fly straight when it's not equipped with wings in the first place.
> The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information.
This is entirely different from what the rest of your post says. Your actual point seems to be that the big difference is that authoritarian regimes are authoritarian, not that their surveillance implementations are particularly secretive.
Lumping India in as an authoritarian regime is sort of odd, but okay. How about Egypt? Singapore? Kenya? Brazil? Argentina? Turkey? My point is just that this kind of surveillance is a global phenomenon. My unstated point is that it's a product of national boundaries. Just like the existence of strong corporations results in corporate espionage and internal monitoring, the existence of strong governments results in government espionage and internal monitoring. If you tell them to compete, they're going to compete, and they're not going to be nice about it.
See my answer to a similar question below. Are you arguing that Egypt is not an authoritarian regime? As for the others you mention, I have no information about their surveillance program. But you are right, my use of "Western" was inappropriate. I should have said "country with a functional democracy" instead. But essentially, if you don't already have separation of powers, an independent judiciary and the sort of check and balances which are typical of democracies, you are going to get mass surveillance anyway, as long as the tech level is sufficient, because there is no reason for an authoritarian regime not to do. Mass surveillance is a feature of authoritarian regimes (see 1984 or what the Stasi tried to do). In democracies, it's a bug.
So you'd need to transition Russia to a democratic state before you could tackle mass surveillance.
You don't know how to fix it? Here's a start: stop grouping people into ridiculously large categories like "Westerners" or "politicians" or "terrorists". How do you think this starts?