Interestingly, a few tweets later in the same thread is this tweet:

"meanwhile in the usa 🇺🇸 you get sent to a restrain chair for walking your dog without a leash."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFG4KKwtEZo

They also used taser on her as she was already on the chair: "Did you see this? (tazzzap) (she cries from pain) It will happen again, so sit down and stop resisting."

At least there's a difference: there's no record of her being interrogated later while bound to the chair.

Or, maybe a bit more relevant, surveillance in action in the U.S. of A (2012):

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Bunti...

"British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter jokes"

It’s not just what “could” happen.

Let's not compare systematic and institutionalized measures to news-worthy odd cases.

Claiming these issues are not systematic [0] and institutionalized [1], is willfully ignoring a very apparent problem.

This isn't even reserved to US police, the whole system is flawed to the root due to being based on retribution and vengeance, instead of actual rehabilitation, which feeds exactly the kind of straight-up sadism showcased so often by US police and the US justice system.

Case in point: Tazzing a restrained woman is justified with her having been "argumentative" [2].

Just follow the orders, be obedient, lick some boots, and then this will supposedly never happen to you, is a very common reply to these "news-worthy odd cases".

But these "news-worthy odd cases" are merely the tip of an iceberg that is the US justice system boasting the highest incarceration rate and the largest prisoner population on the planet. Many of them working in for-profit forced labor prisons [3] or being imprisoned under circumstances that some would rate as torture [4].

It's all extremely authoritarian [5], deeply embedded into the country and culture, but regularly overshadowed by the chants of "Land of the free!" distracting from the crass actual reality.

[0] https://time.com/4878195/civil-asset-forfeiture-jeff-session...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

[2] https://youtu.be/TFG4KKwtEZo

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/17/us-pri...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

Just to be clear, if you were in China and made these kinds of comments about Chinese police online, more likely then not you would end up in a much worse situation, if you didn't use appropriate counter measures.

China having worse systematic problems than the US inn this area doesn't change the fact that the US problems are systematic and (from the perspective of value systems around individual rights commonly espoused in America) serious.

And China is nowhere near the standard for freedom of speech we expect in America.

This needs its own thread.

What does Snowden have to say about surveillance in Russia?

He's often critical of Russia despite being a guest of that country, and has expressed a want to return home on the record numerous times.