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Surveillance is worse. In 1984 there was one camera and one microphone per room. Now we carry multiple cameras and microphones and tracking devices everywhere we go. In 1984 the party had to break into an apartment to read a person's journal. Now our most private thoughts are stored in text messages, private Facebook posts, and Evernote, within easy and undetectable reach of governments. Behavioral analysis can tell surveillance operators things about us that we don't even know about ourselves. Every person we talk to on the phone, every page we like, every link we share on our blogs can be wired together into a graph of our identity, ideas, and social networks (see software like Palantir).

You would think with all the posts about East Germany on here lately people would recognise this.

Edit: playing devil's advocate, you could almost argue that the surveillance system in the UK is at least a lot better than that of Airstrip One/the GDR - while the level of surveillance is perhaps about the same, the Thought Police/Stasi used it to feed their obsession with picking up harmless political dissenters, while at the very least GHCQ seems to (thankfully) be focussed on (somewhat) more genuine existential threats.

I thought the same thing. Until they're subjecting people to having their body parts gnawed off by live rats, this is hyperbolic bullshit and it doesn't help the conversation.