"US worse than the USSR"? American Amnesia of the worst sort

[dairydog91]

90. It's setting itself up to be spectacularly bad.

The American espionage complex just keeps growing. All it takes is one good, sharp crisis to get a majority of voters to panic and "flip the switch". Democracies have certainly been known to engage in bizarre or viciously tribalistic voting patterns when faced with bad times (even in its good times, the US wiped out or forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Native Americans). In that situation, whatever temporary Froot Loop regime temporarily rides in will have a ready-to-go spying apparatus that vastly dwarfs anything the KGB, Stasi, Gestapo, or any other 20th century secret police regime had. Even the most ambitious secret police 50-60 years ago didn't have the technical capability to track everyone's movement at all times (Something that can be done with cell phone location data and a big enough processing infrastructure), or comb every single letter and phone call for key-flagged words, or use metadata mapping to assemble a real-time and historical map of every social interaction every citizen is or was carrying out by phone. The US either has or will soon have the ability to do all that. The FISA court provides about as much protection as a secret court could be expected to do, aka "Not Much" (And every judge is appointed by Justice Roberts, who manages to make Scalia look like Thurgood Marshall when it comes to restrictions on government searches).