story
Back to the conversation, what might prove slightly useful from this comparison is that in the USSR and German Democratic Republic surveillance was mostly done through the use of one's acquaintances and often-times even close relatives, because as the article mentions back then secret police forces didn't have access to today's technology.
That's what made it very personal and invasive and what ruined lots of lives and close-relationships, while today's surveillance techniques seem to be (and I'd say they are indeed) more remote and not that soul-crunching. In the old system you risked to have your sister or brother-in-law snitching on you for listening to Radio Free Europe or for making a regime-related joke, you had to be always on the alert of what you were saying and to whom you were speaking. I think this is why in the present day and age we don't see lots of protests against this new surveillance system, it's far too remote from us so we tend not to notice it.
The problem with widespread surveillance isn't that it's inherently malicious, it's that it's inherently dangerous. Because most people are good, the potential it creates in the hands of a good leader to catch evil terrorists will always be less than the potential it creates in the hands of an evil leader to catch good freedom fighters. It's a tool for the concentration of power. And it shrinks the time lag during which to mount a resistance between when someone malicious takes power and when the whole world is on fire.
If not, instead of arguing by outrageous and irrelevant historical innuendo, you could express quite reasonable concerns about consequences of excessive security powers that are actually likely to happen.
It would be a much more convincing argument.
(since both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks very openly stated their intent to violently suppress people fitting certain criteria and had militant wings actually targeting them long before they achieved the power that enabled them to set the surveillance, I'm not sure the historical comparison even works...)
What about a president 10 or 15 years from now?
Frankly, if you think that in 10-15 years America is remotely likely to be introducing gulags and death camps, then NSA surveillance is the last thing you should be worrying about; Hitler nor Stalin neither had nor needed an effective way of monitoring most private communications to eliminate all resistance and millions of people. If I was worried prospective presidential candidates were secretly plotting to lock me in camps I'd probably support the government going all Richard Nixon and wiretapping the opposition.
The possibility for individual abuse is certainly worth emphasizing, but the risk of systemic corruption is not to be dismissed.
People blame Hitler and Stalin individually, but they were far from the only ones in their respective countries with blood on their hands. A President who comes in and says "I want to build death camps" with no popular support is not going anywhere. But nobody advocating them will actually call them death camps. They get names like "military detention center" or just plain old prison. The people put there get sold to the population as terrorists or violent gang members. The soldiers or police don't contemplate what they're doing as wrong, even if humans die or are abused, because they're "the enemy" and they don't count.
And even if we never make it to death camps, every step on that road is human suffering. Even our existing prison and criminal justice system is an unfathomable catastrophe that people fail to revolt against almost entirely because those with the capacity to make change are not aware of the true nature of the existing system. The entire concept of secret surveillance with secret courts making secret laws can only exacerbate that effect significantly, creating the very real risk that one day we'll wake up to a world vastly different than the one we previously contemplated solely because no one was allowed to tell us about the changes until it had already happened.
