| The US imprisons its ethnic minorities in inhumane camps (where torture in the form of extended stays in the SHU is not only legal but routine, as well as the same forced sterilizations) at a rate 17x higher (per capita) than China does, FWIW. https://talkpoverty.org/2017/08/23/u-s-still-forcibly-steril... It does matter what you do with the surveillance. Senior DEA officials say they use warrantless mass surveillance to perform parallel construction "almost daily", according to Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Trials are mostly for show, as the actual source of the evidence in these kinds of cases is completely illegal under the US constitution, and the evidence admitted and used in the sham trials is actually inadmissible under the rules of evidence ("fruit of the poison tree"). From the Reuters article above: > The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. |