That's true, I'm not saying that never happens. I'm just saying one should evaluate the likelihood of something happening, not just the risk itself, or you might end up depriving yourself of useful experiences and interactions, de facto letting the feds win without even actually doing anything.

Again even in that case I would ask myself, why would they pick me out of the other million people that were at the same march?

Unfortunately the line between safety and self-destroying paranoia, isn't that thick.

"Capacity" doesn't merely regard hardware. Right now in the US, the number of active LE officers is outnumbered 400 to 1. Meaning each police officer/FBI agent would have to keep an eye on 400 people at a time to get to the kind of surveillance state that many think is already here (it's not). The situation is similar if not worse in the rest of the western world. The UK is seeing record low numbers of LE officers, so low that the government changed the law few years ago to allow people with face tatoos in the force lol.

They do monitor individual "Profiles" when they have justifiable reasons for it. Monitoring aprofile can include everything, phone monitoring, social media monitoring, physical monitoring. But again, you must have been cause of serious worry for them to start such investigations on you.

In most cases simply attending a protest, which is protected by the constitution, would not amount to that kind of surveillance, even for the simple fact of lack of officers to monitor every attendant to the protest.

Again I'm not saying this stuff doesn't happen. It does happen, sometimes officers can pick on you and make stuff up to justify it, the use of AI models for this type of operations is gonna makes things worse for sure, and the way trump is using ICE as his personal paramilitary group also doesnt help, but we are still very very far for that Orwell's 1984 type of surveillance, merely from a technology and capacity standpoint.

Right now the people that are monitoring every single of your actions are big tech, not police or governments. And what I'm arguing is simply that safety should not come at the cost of action. Because that's also how they get you, either by arresting you or by making you so afraid that you won't rise up against them. They win in both cases.

I speak for me personally now when I say that even though I'm a privacy advocate, my priority is to try make change even at the cost of putting myself in risky situations, that's actually why I am a privacy advocate. It's not a tool I use to hide from the system, it's a tool I use to keep myself safe as I go against the system.