Strange that you're saying this because that's exactly how I understood it: people were extremely mindful of what they're saying but even with that you had "agents" in disguise who really stretched the definition of "treason", many times over, just to be able to do a few arrests daily. In the books it was also shown that the mere fact of singing along a song that praised their emperor was also grounds for being arrested (which was quite absurd because praising that guy was a requirement anyway).