Zero people on HN are going to speak up for "National Security Letter" gag orders on ISPs.
So instead we'll have a "Price is Right"-style competition to see who can be as hyperbolic as possible "without going over", as you have by drawing an equivalence between post-PATRIOT America and East Germany or Myanmar. Oops! I called you on that! Next contestant!
Try some perspective. A nation of hundreds of millions of people is going to get shit wrong. We barely got out of the gate before we had Alien & Sedition. Just a few decades ago we had HUAC. We're the fine folks who brought us the Tuskegee experiments. At least the people running the show at FBI have a pretense of the public good.
Obviously, despite being too much of a blowhard aspie to avoid ranting back at you, I flagged this story. Hopefully 10 or so more people will too. Regardless how "important" this story is --- a story we've known about for many years now, in its specifics --- there's no purposeful discussion HN is capable of having about it.
A good rule of thumb is, if the story has more to do with politics than technology, and it's hard to imagine anyone managing to take a countervailing position, the story doesn't belong here. That's not a value judgement about the impact of the story; HN simply isn't a noticeboard or organizing tool for stuff like this.
The term police state describes a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.
The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.
Stop crying wolf, it's unhelpful. There are a lot of things wrong with the way police powers are exercised in the US, but it is a far cry from the STASI or the Gestapo. America is not even remotely a police state yet and the more that hyperbolic statements like yours get bandied about the more the debate degrades into meaningless. And thus ineffectualness.
We should be able to discuss these problems maturely without regressing to useless hyperbole. Once you've cast the political playing field into manichean terms of absolute good vs absolute evil all productive debate ceases.
I don't want this issue to become the 21st century's abortion debate. I want people to talk about it rationally, discuss the serious issues of openness in government and the critical value of individual liberty and to convince people of the right course of action, not bludgeon them over the head and try to bully them into agreement.
