I used to think the same way, until I became friends with a Tibetan who smuggles himself in and out of Tibet to help villagers resist China's genocide and colonization there. We were both living in a third country in Asia right when Snowden bailed to Russia, and I remarked that America's NSA and Patriot Acts were as bad as China's spying on its own population. He became almost furious. He convinced me that comparing American surveillance to Chinese surveillance is an absolutely false equivalence on moral grounds. Americans have access to lawyers and courts. America has a constitution and a free press. America's officials are elected. Individuals in America have legal rights. There are limits to what the American government can do to you personally. If you say something they don't like, the American government cannot go after your family. China has no such limits. To compare the two is not just false equivalence, he said. It's aiding in spreading the lies of authoritarian propaganda.

He convinced me with these words that the false equivalence was in fact a lie that the Chinese government wants Europeans and Americans to believe. And I came to see that he was right.

I'll note that I was, at one point, scared and chased out of the United States, had my apartment surveilled and broken into, and police going through my trash cans, all because of a novel I wrote and posted online. When I met my Tibetan friend I had been exiled from the US for nearly 8 years, and had no trust in it. That conversation, and living in several authoritarian countries, was the starting point of changing my mind about there being no difference.