What stands out to me is that in Iran surveillance isn’t just about control,it’s about regime survival,It shifts the power balance so heavily toward the state that dissent gets detected and shut down before it can even scale That’s how a very small ruling core can stay in power for decades Also the West vs authoritarian framing feels incomplete. Iran relies on intense territorial surveillance while Western tech often creates softer but global scale data power. Different styles but the same core dynamic: whoever controls information can lock in power. So privacy here isn’t an abstract liberal value, in a context like Iran it’s basically the minimum condition for people to have any real political agency at all