Remember the soviet was famous for this?
You could snoop or snitch on your neighbor to have them taken away in the night.

This wouldn't happen if people knew history.
I'd say Russians reading these articles would be slightly disturbed by them.

The soviet wasn't/ isn't the only place which encouraged this behaviour. Australia has just allowed secret phone tapping etc, the Bush administration has embraced every form of this sort of terror willingly, and then we can start looking at other fascist and communist powers.
It is a very effective way of using terror, because we all have read horrendous stories of this surveillance gone wrong.
(I nearly commented lightheartedly that the British would have a revival of neighbourliness. That shows that I could be starting to accept surveillance as a part of life.)

Its amazing, your own people are killed in your country whilst going about their lives. Yet, the laws to prevent this from happening again are put in place on the victims.
I know, I know... the justification for this is the enemy is amongst you so you all must suffer as a result. What a lame excuse especially when peoples favored place for news is the tv and "news papers". A little digging and you'll see who owns them.

Not that he was a great man but still a relevant quote:

"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."
- Aleister Crowley