What is much more dangerous is countries where people they live under a democracy but once some information about people in power pop up it could be silenced, flooded with disinformation, you may disappear, you may hide for rest of your life in some embassy like Assange. Anything can happen. And people with money and power have total control. They just often use indirect, hidden measures to achieve that. We don't even know who are those people, they don't have to be public figures like dictators etc. This is much more scary.
And KGB, stasi, etc never ever dreamed of such control on people and survivlence modern social networks and technologies provide. And western 3-letter agencies have much more power those could even dream of.
And you know what is more scary? That nobody give a f*. Even if information about some really scary stuff appear in media everyone would just forgot about that next day. Or media would even make a show out of it. Like that episode in a black mirror. Everyone knows their phones are spying on them but keep using them. It's not just convinient, I can't order a taxi anymore without a smartphone. Few years ago I could just catch a car not anymore. You can't take a subway or a bus without being seen on 100 CCTV cams with facial recognition. And if you question if that's normal you would be asked "what you have something to hide or what?". Maybe I'm just not an exhibicionist.