&gt;  It is incontrovertible that the U.S. is using electronic data gathered right now by itself and by private technology companies to screw with people.<p>Yes, it is. But these are not the people that the argument is about and that&#x27;s precisely the problem here. They don&#x27;t feel that it concerns them at all, it is always others who need to worry about what is done with that data, they have nothing to hide and absolutely nothing to fear.<p>&gt;  Literally billions of dollars will be spent on that purpose this year alone.<p>10&#x27;s to 100&#x27;s of billions of dollars.<p>&gt;  There are also the government agencies of a dozen or two other countries which the U.S. government agencies work with and share data with to a greater or lesser extent.<p>Yes.<p>&gt; Literally thousands of newspaper articles have been written about this.<p>Indeed. But since this has not yet resulted in mass arrests on US soil this evidence amounts to nothing in the eyes of those that see it as a &#x27;good thing&#x27;, these people are keeping us all safe and are merely doing their jobs. Incredible to you, to me and lots of others but still that&#x27;s a position that quite a few people hold and not much that you will say or do will persuade them from that point of view.<p>So, I don&#x27;t need to use the past as a reference. But it is strange to see a person that would refuse to learn from history to be able to apply the lessons to todays environment. I&#x27;m working on a second part of that blog post about &#x27;if you&#x27;ve got nothing to hide&#x27; that concentrates on the present (I think the past has been dealt with), but I still feel that those are such enormously important reminders that they serve as a good backgrounder for why all this stuff matters.<p>So this is a simple choice grounded in the &#x27;those that refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it&#x27; line.<p>&gt; The U.S. government has several orders of magnitude more information about the private lives and communications and beliefs and activities of its citizens than East Germany ever had.<p>This is true. But the mere possession is not enough to sway a die-hard denier of danger and supporter of the surveillance state. All that data by their reckoning is in good hands it is there merely to protect them from unseen dangers.<p>Obviously I disagree strongly with that position but that&#x27;s probably because (1) I&#x27;ve lived for a bit in a country that was a police state by most definitions and (2) I&#x27;ve seen how the various layers of that society would deal with this (the majority were just like karmacondon here, only a very small minority dared to take a stance, the rest saw the whole thing as essentially beneficial, which retrospectively may seem very hard to understand. In fact even today there are still those that yearn for the communist days when life was orderly, everybody had a job and everybody had a pension waiting for them at the end of the line).