Just because people didn't have Twitter or TikTok in 50s and 60s doesn't mean that people didn't think about these things. It was only disseminated to a tighter group, so they're closer, less prominent and smaller.

Increase in the speed of communication and in overall population allowed greater dissemination in shorter time, that's it. Before, more manual methods worked well enough to get a sniff of these activities, but it doesn't work now. So, governments want their cake back.

CIA did mass surveillance on state level with Crypto AG. Russians bugged whole fleet of diplomatic IBM typewriters. Intelligence agencies listened people via central heating pipes, insiders were planted inside suspected groups... The ways were numerous, and still are. The people, society and technology is evolving. So the game.

I don't support the initiative, but that's the state of the play right now.

This might be backwards when looked from there, but this is how it looks from here.