Excuse me. It seems like you are the one assuming "Not as bad as the Soviet Union" is good enough. My family is from an FSU country, and they would not settle for that.

GP: > Edward Snowden revealed that the USA was monitoring its citizens and storing that data in a way that far outstrips anything the KGB was ever capable of. Should he fear repression?

Me: > There is little evidence that the NSA monitoring was used for repression of citizens, and even less evidence of the sort of repression that was rampant in the Soviet bloc

You: > Do you think that people who want fundamental change in the US are not harassed and repressed, and their activities criminalized?

The context of the discussion is literally about whether the US is better than the Soviet Union. And is is, by a huge margin.

It's not about settling, it's about not derailing a discussion about NSA overreach and legitimate democratic issues in the US (and most other western countries) by making hyperbolic comparisons that aren't even in the same league.

But even then, the article you linked to is not even remotely evidence of anyone being "harassed and repressed, and their activities criminalized" in any sense, Soviet or otherwise. To the contrary, it's evidence that there exists freedom to openly discuss big and fundamental issues of government without fearing repression.