I think it's valid to say that governments like these do abuse surveillance, but my problem with this as an argument in these discussions is that it also equally applies to anything else. They abuse the power of police, of the military, of state owned enterprises and anything else, but yet in other nations we still rely on all of these facilities to a large degree.

So I think there should be a distinction between problems intrinstic to surveillance, and bad actors using surveillance as a tool for abuse.