I hate to rain on people's parade but....

[HiPointDem]

73. "The term electronic police state describes a state in which the government aggressively

uses electronic technologies to record, organize, search, and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_police_state


As previously discussed, it is not possible to objectively determine whether a nation has become or is becoming a police state... However, there are a few highly debated examples which serve to illustrate partial characteristics of a police state's structure. These examples are listed below.

The South African apartheid system was generally considered to have been a police state despite having been nominally a democracy (albeit with the Black African majority population excluded from the democracy).

The Soviet Union and its many satellite states, including North Korea and East Germany were notorious for their extensive and repressive police and intelligence services, with approximately 2.5% of the East German adult population serving (knowingly or unknowingly) as informants for the Stasi.

Nazi Germany, a dictatorship, was, at least initially, brought into being through a nominal democracy, yet exerted repressive controls over its people. Germany was a police state; using the SS/SA to assert control over the population in the 1930s

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders ranked North Korea second last out of 168 countries in a test of press freedom. It has been reported that the only TV channel in North Korea predominately eulogises the country's past leaders Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung. As a result, some locals in Pyongyang have been quoted as stating that their leaders are gods.[8]

George Churchill-Coleman, who headed Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad in the United Kingdom, stated he had a "horrible feeling" that Britain was moving in the direction of a police state. Claims of police state behaviour have been dismissed by the UK government.

The term "police state" was first used in 1851, in reference to the use of a national police force to maintain order in Austria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state