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.