In a sense, surveillance is a multiplier on your goons, creating virtual goons. If you have 5 goons but you can send them directly to the house of people who disagree with the government with 99% accuracy, it's like you had 500 goons waiting outside 500 houses then only entering the ones where people disagree with the government.

Goons work MUCH better than rockets for intimidation, and actually scale much better.

Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.

A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.

Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?

And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.

If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .

Goons are bad publicity. Doing your dirty stuff as hidden from view as possible is best option

Its called police. And they scale extraordinarily well.

And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like.

And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons.

The UK gov has shown to be incredibly efficient at arresting and imprisoning citizens for social media comments.

Missiles are a lot more expensive and much less reusable than goons though. If the nation state can’t afford the goons, it can’t afford to missile you either

The cost effectiveness is the intimidation and chilling effects on a wider population, when that can be achieved with a small number of actual goons.

The other day an ICE lawyer told our state's court that when a bunch of ICE agents rolled up to a private citizen's house and harassed and threatened them, they "were not acting according to policy"

So, yeah.

But none of that stops Meta wanting to help Trump be more efficient at harassing discontent.

It can always get worse. Always.

But you don't have autonomous mini drones, only the leader of the free world does.

Are you living under a rock?