It’s worth remembering that many Germans still have direct experience of living in the surveillance state of East Germany, and I would expect know better than most how these tools can be used
I think the parent poster meant that the memory of a surveillance State is alive and well in East Germany because it was only two generations ago.
In other countries like France and Belgium, the surveillance State has been aimed at specific communities and at remote colonies lately, but a generalized state of surveillance has not been seen since the 1940s so people tend to underestimate the dangers of that based on little living memory of how authoritarianism grows.
