If I use my imagination, and close my eyes trying to envision the rapidly-expanding Police State, I almost hear the swirling, and the clinks and clanks of the fascist infrastructure finally being put together after after a thirty five-plus years in development.
The plutocratic neo-fascists poured money into the plan a few decades ago, and funded the think tanks that would facilitate the wholesale takeover of our government and the levers power (media, academia, policing, war), and the methodical dismantling of the proper regulatory framework (which was meant to prevent dangerous concentration of power, and fraud), and the piece-by-piece curtailment of constitutional protections under the guise of national security.
As the (manufactured) fog of fear and misinformation engulfs the entire media (and social) landscape, it acts as a chemical mist that renders most citizens unable to first, understand what's happening, and second, do anything (substantive) about it.
And so the entire political and governmental system is taken over by the neo-fascist plutocrats, and once the takeover is total (as it is now), they quickly move to lock into place the Police State that will be used to consolidate their power.
And increasingly, the FBI and CIA engages in a higher number of unfounded investigations, surveillance, and dragnets against citizens. A growing number of sadistic "trainers" are kept busy flying around the country polluting the minds of countless law enforcement officials with total bullshit that targets certain groups of people.
Thousands of "national security" secret letters (orders) are presented to businesses and institutions across the country requesting all kinds of information about unsuspecting citizens, while forbidding those businesses or institutions from informing the targeted individual.
GPS devices are being used by law enforcement to track people down, without court orders.
The State is rounding up thousands of people (that happen to be undocumented) and housing them in for-profit private prisons, subjected to brutal conditions, and being denied medical attention, causing many to die. The State is ordering extra-judicial assassinations of U.S. citizens.
Google, and Yahoo, and YouTube, and Twitter, and Facebook, and AT&T, and Verizon, and thousands others, are routinely asked to provide information about their users.
And now the Police State can see through your walls!
But not to worry... As "always," if you didn't do anything wrong, there is nothing to worry about. These technologies, and the increasingly oppressive Police State are only meant to target the bad, scary bogeyman. When the drone capable of seeing through walls, drops the precision-guided missile on someone's ass, is because they deserved it. No need for niceties like due process under the law, habeas corpus, ability to defend yourself, etc. Those considerations are quite quaint.
If the government tells you they smoked some guy because he was "dangerous," even if he hadn't committed any actual crime, you better believe it. Easy as that.
And if people are targeted with less destructive force, and the "bad" guy just happens to fall over dead from a "heart attack" or a "stroke," well, those are the advances of "technology."
And as the Police State continues to grow and consolidate power, if a general sense of fear starts to spread, and people start feeling unease about exercising their constitutional rights of freedom of expression by harshly criticizing the government, or exchanging an email with "the wrong person," or talking to somebody who may be subject of the increasingly expanding surveillance dragnet, or expressing political views that may be perceived as subversive, then, that's the price of security.
Welcome to the newly-minted Police State. Orwell could not have written all the details. But he came close to it, of course.