Your last sentence diminished the value of first sentence. The countries your mentioned are just different not authoritarian and probably are so because of too-much-fingering by imperialist countries.
I often see this word "social control", I wonder what would be your strategy to escape from technological developments and use of such tools by states to control masses. I don't see there is any escape and these are getting more powerful and effective with the time. So science and technology has same effects and I see there is no escape for humanity except to find shelter in religious camp to find reason and morality etc ...
I am surprised we don't hate scientists who developed devastating weapons ! Instead I see otherwise. I think there are also extremists in secular camps by this definition.
I agree with you, now its normal practice to blame someone without evidence. Intelligence communities around the world are major source of "fake news" and media manipulate. My understanding is that "whistleblowers" are part of experiments done by intelligence communities to gauge public response on certain activities(might be illegal ,immoral) and with passage of time we forget and accept theses practices as new normal.