> In the DDR they would keep records when college students left and returned to the dorms, who was talking to whom, etc. What exactly is the difference between that and what we do, please do explain?
People were risking machine-gun fire to try to escape from the DDR. (The difference is in the aim of the information gathering. If people who may be Muslim terrorists are taking flight training in U.S. schools, I want the government to know about it.)
> ...once the power shifts in one direction, it tends to never really go back the other way...
The times we look back upon as “America, land of the brave and the free” were after the examples I gave (unless we are very old).
The difference between America today and the DDR is that we do it with a smile.
When you go to an airport, they X-ray you without probable cause, at the border to the DDR they use to have X-ray machines, I know, I grew up not to far from one in W. Germany. We use shake our heads in disbelief of how ridiculous this was. Today instead of a man in a gray trench coat, an agent in a cheap suit made in China interviews the children in a public school without parental consent or knowledge (your Constitution at work). Today instead of a fat guy with a note pad writing down when people come and go, nearly anything can be tracked through video monitoring of all the roads, toll records, GPS on cars, cell phones, credit cards etc. Instead of tens of thousands that sit and listen, you can filter it electronically, and need less people to do more and much quicker with the ability to transfer and store as well as search the material in many different ways. Today when our government abridges basic Constitutional rights, it of course has much better reason than the DDR, because they didn't use “national security” as their reason unlike us, right? So when every little hick police buys drones and parks them over your house, DHS drives through neighborhoods X-raying cars or entire houses, it's all good: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-body-scan-technology-deployed-in-street-roving-vans/ (Just use the magic words, national security or for the children, then the US Constitution can be circumnavigated - temporarily)
So when we detain people without access to a lawyer, don't tell them what they are accused of, kidnap folks in other countries, interrogate them more vigorously (lol), or we send them off to Egypt or Jordan where someone else interrogates them extra vigorously, it's all cool and we don't torture, right? When we have secret courts, and restrict people from leaving the country even though they have not been sentenced or even been accused of a crime that they are made aware of, we of course have a legitimate reason and it's all OK.
I got it, if we do it, it's OK, anyone else, they're bad.
If you took a microphone and walked the streets of Europe, Japan, or S. Korea today and asked, “who do you see as a greater threat, the US or Russia,” you would be amazed at the answer. Our innocence is gone, and instead of being viewed as the Free and Brave, we are seen as the Brave New World. Don't confuse your ability to consume and make choices between what fast food you want to eat or being able to have sexual relations and marry someone of the same sex with “real” freedom.
1984 was to be a warning, not an instructional manual.
How many links or sources do you like:
http://www.salon.com/2009/06/30/accountability_7/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/05/05/how-many-were-tortured-to-death.html
Your argument is merely dependent on which way the guns are pointed, not on whether there is a rule of law / adherence to a Constitution.