Why "a free state" as opposed to "the state"?

[DetlefK]

46. But this would lead to new problems for the rebels:

1. The heart of the people is the key to change. For example: Let's say there is a group of 10,000 people fighting king Obummer I. They grab their assault- and sniper-rifles and start killing anybody who supports the regime. What will the other millions of people make of that? Will they side with the terrorists who murder from the shadows?
As long as the people aren't on the side of the rebels, the rebels don't have a legitimate cause. 10,000 rebels is nothing compared to the will of the population as a whole.

2. The US is a surveillance-state. They track your whereabouts via the GPS in your Smartphone, they track your electronic communications. The CIA even hacked computers of Congress and it did so without legal consequences. If you give it a clear target and you have the right programs and people, data-mining is an extremely powerful tool that can tell you next to anything about a specific person. (By tracing pathways of electronic communications, the CIA found a major communications-hub of Al-Qaida in Pakistan, right in the region where Osama Bin Laden had his house. But no analyst thought that it was remarkable and this info didn't enter the hunt for Bin Laden. The correlation was only re-discovered after he was dead.)
The big difficulty for the rebels would be to grow and spread without leaving electronic traces. (The italian Mafia uses a system of couriers and hand-written instructions.) The rebels would never live long enough to grow so big that they can claim to be a legitimate resistance and representatives of the true will of the people.





It's not guns that fight tyranny. It's the hearts and minds of the people. Without those, you are not a rebel but a terrorist.