As a Vietnamese, that sounds meaningless because Vietnam never had much of a "surveillance system" nor an effective population database well into the 2000s. I have no doubt the effort was there for them to control people, but a complete lack of competency invalidated it.

Vietnam has had a security apparatus all the way down to the neighborhood block level since the 1950’s. It was low tech and relied mostly on human surveillance but it did exist.

It has collected biometric information for a while and now has facial recognition in place for every single Vietnamese at this point. Combined with the camera coverage in Vietnam now I wouldn’t be surprised they can track anyone they wanted.

Public security cameras are not widely deployed, like, at all. However the police state in Vietnam (the current president came from the same position Putin held before presidency) has adopt this amusing practice of showing up & demanding security footage from private houses' cameras facing the street (which, turns out to cover much more than surveillance cams could ever).

More insane is them also passing a law that forbid usages of the same footages for citizen journalism purposes. This came out after someone posted a footage from their home cam recording that controversial accident when a congressman hit and kill a high-schooler unprosecuted. You can look it up.

I’ve been paying attention to the incident you speak of since it’s so interesting to see how an authoritarian system deals with it.

I was quite amazed when the father of the teenager made a statement about “maintaining harmony”. It’s right out of the stories you’d hear about life in the USSR.

Self censorship is the term I believe. As an Asian I definitely do have this part of my brain that tells me to handle everything in a pragmatic, locally optimal way, even when it's unjust.