Yeah, political dissidents don't dissapear - yet, I'll give you that. That's mostly because the system is rigged so that they don't have much impact anyway, they're organically lost in the noise.

In times where there's more fear about dissidents, you get McCarthyism, blacklists, and people fired from their jobs, Hoover's FBI blackmailing politicians and journalists, and so on. And even in more benign times, from MLK to SDS members, and from human rights activists to Kent State students, had taps on them, police records in the tens of thousands of pages, intimidation, and attempts to frame them with drugs, snitches and other BS. Heck, even John Lennon, a harmless famous pop culture figure if I ever saw one, had FBI records the size of a small library.

And this goes all the way to modern OWS members, environmental and political activists, black rights activists, character-assasinated journalists (from Garry Webb to Greenwald), and so on.

And if we extend it to the "but they deserve it, no?", war on terror, I don't see much of a difference between a state with black sites, extra-judicial drone killings, and off-shore off-due-process camps, with people exposing state crimes like Manning in prison and Snowden in exile...

Try posting some middle eastern terrorist stuff on your apple phone. Most likely you will have a lot of fun next time you want to get on a plane.

Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...

Actually, that probably isn’t true, and anyways it’s an easy experiment to perform.

> Western phones are no different, the only difference is in which government actually manages the data...

In some ways first world oppression is comparable to third world oppression, but they are different in scale and magnitude.