(I'm assuming they would just have ISPs monitoring traffic or whatever)
> we in the west arent that far behind authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran and Russia
In terms of the surveilance capabilities of the state, you're probably right. But e.g. China censors perhaps hundreds of thousands of messages a day and blocks access to vast swathes of the web. It actively uses online surveilance to crack down on activists and civil society groups on a routine basis. I don't like governmental overreach in surveilance and I think their systematic weakening of civilian security and privacy are massively counter-productive. There are also too many cases of police abusein many wester countries. But that's not the same as running a systematic, actively authoritarian police state.