China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

Someone in this thread mentioned $4.7 billion (quoted as 30B RMB in this thread) on the security and surveillance, for just Xinjiang, which has a population of 21m give or take, out of China's 1.37 billion people. That's obviously a lot of money (for comparison the entire US intelligence budget is maybe an order of magnitude higher annually), so I'd assume that when in China, and maybe outside of it, basically whatever you do can/could be monitored.

I get the impression that if you're not, I don't know, doing detailed dissident planning it's not an issue, so this would seem the same standard as pretty free Americans would expect. In America, yeah if you spend 18 months downloading textbooks on bombmaking, buying laboratory equipment on Amazon, and then eventually industrial sizes of fertilizer, ammonia, and remote demolition detonators on Ali Express, while getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin from seling a 1-page haircut ebook which has 1 review stating it was useless, while you spend most of your time travelling between Syria and Washington DC, where you're at home on the dark net all day over tor, reading arabic language anti-American calls for terrorism and jihad, you would expect to get a visit at some point between when you start that journey and when you're on skype bidding your mother back home goodbye, saying that you will die for a worthy cause in your Jihad against the U.S. imperialist pigs and asking for her bank account information. I mean sure everything I've just stated (literally the entirety of this paragraph) falls under freedom of expression, freedom of thinking, and freedom of commerce, but as a practical matter you'd expect to be stopped at some point.

So is that the standard? If I go to Beijing but I'm not spending eighteen months travelling between Beijing and Taiwan reading about how to arm rebels for a military coup, how to get what you want by taking political hostages, and taking geographic survey equipment across the street from state buildings in Beijing with a notebook and a "Insurrection for Dummies: How to lead an armed rebellion and communicate with your followers while toppling Beijing's military hegemony" book, as an American could I expect to continue my normal Internet browsing (including reading or posting about "sensitive topics" or whatever)?

I mean on an everyday basis. Note that my Chinese example didn't include purchasing fertilizer and detonators, so I get that the standard could be a bit lower - but does normal American online behavior count? Or would an American not be able to enjoy their usual online freedom without getting lots of problems?

this isn't going well...

The problem is that 'their' only objective is to undermine 'our' goal of having a balanced, honest discussion that arrives at some kind of valid, valuable truth. If a troll or discourse control agent can undermine that process, then they've 'won'.

And it's pretty easy to do. Actually, demanding sources is a great tool for undermining absolutely any discussion you like.

Someone claims something you don't like? Demand evidence/sources. If they can't produce them, you've won. If they can produce them, call into question the bias or veracity of the sources. You win again.

The basic tools of the troll trade are well known - derail, distract, discuss to death. Question motives and bias, use whataboutism, sling mud, lead a discussion into the long grass, debate every single point to death, ad hominem attacks, play the victim...

I think communities perhaps need to become more aware of those discussion patterns and vote according to whether something is using troll tools, rather than whether you agree/disagree.