@0x815 oh, wow. Yea, their stories just seem unbelievable. And also the way some people crossed the border to reach the "free world" seems unbelievable. For example, a band managed to cross the border inside Marshall speakers. Others tried to cross the Danube into Yugoslavia (which was more liberal at the time) and got shot by the Romanian border patrols. It was pretty much hell on Earth.
each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.
Absolutely. Every time I hear about governments snooping inside personal communication I think of how phones were tapped and letters were read for every known or possible dissidents back then. And when an extremist party seems to be on the verge of taking power (and we do have extremist parties as well in Romania) I just think that measures like these would be the first they would implement, along with reducing democratic rights.