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.