There’s a difference between Singaporean, Chinese surveillance, and US surveillance. In the former countries you get surveilled, and in exchange you get to live in a safe, harmonious, and relatively prosperous society where you can leave your belongings out of sight knowing they’ll be there when you come back.

In the US you get no such benefits. The surveillance serves only the government.

I remember watching a video of LKY explaining how Singapore installed 'pee detectors' in elevators to stop people urinating. The point being that a little bit of surveillance to bootstrap civic sense can be a positive thing. Now, look at Singapore today, and it's almost unthinkable an average citizen would urinate in an elevator.

As someone from the UK I envy the safety of these countries. We have overbearing surveillance too but nothing to show for it. Phone gets snatched? Thief will never be caught. Leave your laptop out of sight for a moment? It will be stolen. If surveillance isn't serving the people, who is it serving?