Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
One can criticize analysis of mass surveillance of metadata and encrypted channels, but this is something else.
In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).
Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").
Covid authoritarian policies were hugely successful and supported by mainstream people by and large. Not enough protests. Not enough dissent.
Now politicians know they can turn the power knob as high as they want and nothing will happen. Less and less dissent will be allowed, just like during covid.
If you fail to learn that and denounce those and reclaim the freedoms for all, you're going to just whine into a smaller and smaller room.
The one where citizens don’t regress into comfortably lazy nihilism as a first response.
America has been trashed not by Covid but by the precedence being set that partisan violence can and will be pardoned.
Is there something like this in the EU, so that officials feel personal risk and liability for their actions in pushing this anti democratic policy?
Just as you must work each day if you want money, you must oppose tyranny each day if you want liberty.
They will always want more power over you and you will always have to fight them because of that.
They were temporary and saved lives. Keyword here is temporary.
Of course COVID denialists are angry at it but they won in the USA now so we'll be happy getting more deaths and disabilities now that they are removing our ability to vaccinate ourselves.
In the US we also enjoy probably the most expansive protection of speech in the world at present. Our own government created Tor. Yet simultaneously the majority of the population willingly hands over the minute details of their daily lives to half a dozen or more megacorps for the sake of some minor conveniences. It's beyond perplexing. I suspect we may be the most internally inconsistent civilization to have ever existed.
Which is a much bigger problem than "stay home a bit to avoid unintentionally killing people".
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
American tech will tell them to pound sand, and you got another international incident in the media.
Ancient Rome would elect dictators to take control for two weeks at a time, because that was the only effective way to control a crisis. It remains a very effective way to control a crisis, but it only works if people can trust the political system because the political system is worth trusting. Especially people have to be able to trust they can unelect that guy (at least by waiting two weeks).