Two things afterwards having worked in intelligence: - your examples are really child’s play, I have seen much more sneaky stuff. For example if you think NSA is interested in you, how would you acquire a new computer? - The flip side is that there is still reasonable oversight that is adversarial. At least in the country I’m from. And different branches of government is a real difference from China, at least from now although the executive branch clearly has too much power in the US.