What Mao or Stalin could have done with the resources of the modern Internet? It’s a good question. If you look at the history of the KGB or Stasi, they consumed enormous resources just maintaining and cross-referencing their mountains of paperwork. Imagine what Stalin could have done with a decent MySQL server. We haven’t seen yet what a truly bad government is capable of doing with modern information technology. What the good ones get up to is terrifying enough.