Also, they used to have holocaust survivors come talk at school, and part of those lectures were always about enabling technologies the germans had, but the US had banned (like national ID cards, and a law saying you had to carry and present ID).

We intentionally didn’t have that sort of surveillance in the US up until the early 2000’s, but now we do. They certainly haven’t made us safer. For one thing, we also have orders of magnitude more mass shooting events. For another, the police steal stuff from people all the time using civil forfeiture.

Also, lookup deputy gangs. They’ve been a real thing in the LAPD for 50 years.