The problem with drawing historical parallels is that they never apply exactly. Saying &quot;A thing happened in the past&quot; can be instructive, especially to people who didn&#x27;t even realize that the thing was possible. But what&#x27;s much more practically useful is to say &quot;I think what happened before will happen again <i>in the current context</i> and <i>for these reasons</i>&quot;. An example from the past is only useful if it can be tangibly connected to the current situation, right now in the present.<p>I can&#x27;t think of a case where stable and mature democratic bureaucracy has ever used surveillance to influence the majority of its populace. Germany in the early 20th century was a very instable government in a bad economic situation. Soviet East Germany was communist, which isn&#x27;t quite the kind of democratic that I meant. It&#x27;s true that any government could turn bad, in the same way that anything is possible. But there&#x27;s very little evidence for that in the current context.<p>So my position is this: Given that I live in the United States in 2016, I&#x27;m not worried about the government randomly deciding to screw with me by looking at my electronic communications and acting on them. It just doesn&#x27;t make sense. I&#x27;m not significant relative to the scale of the US government, the government itself just doesn&#x27;t work that way and all of the negative scenarios I&#x27;ve heard seem to be very contrived.<p>If you really think that it&#x27;s possible that the government of a modern western nation could turn into communist East Germany, then it seems like your problem might be with governance, not privacy. If it&#x27;s possible for the government to go all Walter White and just turn evil over night, then no amount of personal privacy is going to save any of us. And until it seems like that&#x27;s a thing that&#x27;s actually possible, I&#x27;m going to make practical decisions about my own privacy.