"Rule By Law"

This is sorta what all the mass surveillance and tracking is about, or at least enables: To ruin the life of any potential dissident. If they can't dig up any dirt from your history, they'll inject it.

Mass surveillance is a nightmare for political activists, key figures in grass root movements, journalists and political opponents.

And that's what makes it a nightmare for the rest of us.

Isn't it a known CIA or FBI technique to imply people are "weird" in some fashion, so that the public doesn't look into cases too much. Like it used to be people accused by them were implied to be homosexual, transexual, furries, weird sex things, etc. Now it's child porn, so that no one would want to look into it too much or want to defend the accused person too much.

But has it ever been any different? Planting illegal items on people has always been a tactic that the law could use to ruin otherwise clean people they don't like. Talking about mass surveillance being the source of the problem kind of distracts from the fact that we need a solution to this form of abuse of power in general.

Part of the answer is probably constant counter-surveillance of law enforcement themselves (body cams, software logging, etc) stored in an immutable or at least tamper evident data store. Of course, you'd still have a "who watches the watchmen" problem.

Sprinkle some crack on ya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY-9P_CnNZg

Why would they need mass surveillance to plant a hard drive full of false evidence?

Speculation or do you have empirical data to back that up?

A lot was speculation until Snowden happened.

How often is it? What are the statistics?