You definitely have the main idea with the panopticon. I think someone more well-read than I could probably make really interesting points about how, in the original form one has an imagined cop in their head constantly enforcing externally-established rules, and this new version has an imagined cop constantly enforcing imagined rules of imagined scope. The notice for what is banned is replaced by a rumor-mill and the occasional high-profile case where “what tripped the censor?” still remains unclear and manual flagging sullies even this very messy sampling method.

I don’t really know that much about the STASI, but it’s not like West Berlin wasn’t also heavily surveilling its denizens, and deaths in East Berlin get wildly overstated to the point of being a farce. That’s probably something gone over in “STASI State or Socialist Paradise?” but I haven’t gotten to it yet.