True
> They're all linked up so the police can remotely follow citizens around towns, along roads, down motorways, etc.
Not true. The police need to ask individually every time they want CCTV footage from private businesses or get a warrant. They do not have convenient access to all CCTV.
> Every bus and train has CCTV on it. Every shop has cameras. People are encouraged to have them in their houses. Whenever there are police documentaries on television they always have CCTV footage of crimes.
And police documentaries don’t show the ones where they don’t have footage or where the criminals got away. If the UK was truly a panopticon there’s be far less crime. I’m not sure what their clearance rate is but people get away with murder in London so I doubt the average mugger has too much to fear from CCTV.
Not sure if you are claiming this, but this does not mean that surveillance is not rampant. You need more than CCTVs for criminals to fear them. Sometimes you do not even need CCTVs for criminals to fear the state.
The UK's pervasive mass surveillance is definitely bad, but you can, for example, campaign and vote against them, right? Do you feel like pervasive CCTV limits who you can vote for or what books you can read? That's not a strawman, that's literally what it's like in China right now.
I wonder, can you really do that, and with ANY effect (leaning towards your goals)?
Yes, of course there is plenty of other sources of authoritarianism. What does it have to do with the fact that China is promoting a pretty horrible system of it?
At least in UK and USA is it legal to be against those.
The Bobbies in downtown London won't haul you off for having a sign that shows the Queen as a Whinny the Poo character.
China doesn't even have free migration within their own country and is actively running concentration camps against their own citizens (Uyghurs).
Western nations have plenty of authoritarianism already. It's just more insidious and under the surface. For example, here in the UK there are CCTV cameras everywhere[1]. They're all linked up so the police can remotely follow citizens around towns, along roads, down motorways, etc. Every bus and train has CCTV on it. Every shop has cameras. People are encouraged to have them in their houses. Whenever there are police documentaries on television they always have CCTV footage of crimes.
We pretend that we're a free liberal democracy, but we're not really. I suspect the same is true for most first world countries.
[1] I live in a small city in the North East of the UK - here's a portion of our traffic cameras https://api.newcastle.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/camera/