Nobody outside of the American fantasy believes this even for a second. In the US you have local law enforcement running around with cell trackers, public and private organizations deploying widespread facial tracking, and let's not even get to the absolute zero data protections Americans enjoy so literally all their data, from location history to purchase history, is available to the highest bidder. But hey, it's not the government doing the tracking so it doesn't matter! Anybody with even half a brain understands that Americans are the most surveiled people on the planet. (Though the Brits are a close second and it's not for lack of trying they're just less competent.)

But really keep focusing on China. Have a feeling this strategy will work great for you.

> It's less aggressive than China in terms of being used to control the lives of the entire population of the country, though.

I'm not sure that's true.

NSA and other US domestic surveillance capabilities feed the information it gathers passively (they call it "strategic listening") for DoD to understand how to influence entire countries, continents, world opinion.

For example, DARPA has a current program called SMISC: "Social Media in Strategic Communication" - where they are studying next generation technologies for determining how information and opinions spread by social media for US intelligence and military botnets and troll armies to influence opinions at scale. This is just a small evolution over the information domination US intelligence and security has applied domestically and globally for decades.