I guess the main difference is one of scale. The vast majority of citizens don't "experience restrictions on mobility or expression" in a significant way, even though it happens to some people.
Should really be:
He was served with an NSL requiring him to gather the private encrypted emails of one of his users.
Rather less inflammatory, and more accurate - the NSL really only affected the person (actually, it may have been slightly more - two people?) using the service that was being targeted. The reason the service was shut down was because of the precendent; the request was definitely not for blanket access to all users communications, which would be blatantly illegal.
Actually, this is exactly what was requested (and was eventually provided).
> "earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata."
> "the documents indicate the bureau was still trying only to capture metadata on one user."
> "while the metadata stream would be captured by a device, the device does not download, does not store, no one looks at it, [and] at the back end of the filter, we get what we’re required to get under the order."
> "So there’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever, [...] No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it."
So, they were still only looking for (and recording) metadata on one user...
Airports. No fly lists. Mass surveillance. Free speech zones, civil forfeiture, national security letters. Millions of Americans have a security clearance, the government has created a two tier system of those inside and everyone else. Big media is tightly controlled in America, and after TPP and other international treaties the internet will also be even more tightly controlled. Civil liberties have been extensively erroded since 9-11, how can anyone besides a shill or the ignorant not know such basic facts?
TL;DR: A sense of proportion is missing from the factoids.
It's a question of principle. Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not. Arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power is still arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power, even if the wielder of that power chooses to use it discreetly. The government is not restricted by the constitution if they can just choose what parts of it they pay lipservice to as they please, even if they do that only seldom and to people who don't matter or "don't deserve our sympathy".
edit. Edited for tone.
> Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not.
Such philosophical absolutes are useless in the actual human experience. You chide me for weak arguments, yet you hold the modern US state and Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Pot's states as morally equal, since they all have extrajudicially killed at least one person and proportionality does not matter. Clearly this is not the case - the world is shades of gray, not black and white absolutes. Some grays are darker than others.
And of all the many, many issues brought up you cherry picked the only one which only effects a (likely) small number of Americans so honestly I'm inclined to give that to you since you've let the other 10 or so very serious charges stand. Hooray, you've established that given what's public knowledge it's reasonable to believe we probably don't secretly execute -that many- american citizens without a trial, if that's what 'defending the establishment' looks like then consider the establishment defended.
I think police state is a little much but honestly it's an amorphous term with no meaning other than as a rhetorical tool to evoke some horrible regimes from history. I don't think we are as bad as them, but in particular the post we are talking about is factual and hardly extremist. We don't have to be in Stalin's Russia for there to be some serious problems.
I wasn't literally saying that the said secret courts were matching a quota of one per year. It was an intentionally extreme example to highlight the concept of proportionality.
And seriously, you chide me for playing funny buggers with numbers, then characterise a list of 11 things as 'many, many'? Not to mention that you're implying that the rest of the items are frequently encountered - how many people actually run into no-fly list problems, or have been corralled into a free speech zone?
Finally, I couldn't give a fuck about the Americanness of the victims. I'm not American myself. I think it's a stain on the general American character that so often in discussion about human rights, that whether or not a victim is a US citizen is a salient issue. Why is it less of a moral crime for an unaccountable court to decide to kill a foreigner they don't like? Why is it less of a crime for a tourist to be put on a no-fly list or have their speech curtailed?
You completely misread me if you think I'm of the opinion that the US doesn't have problems. It has serious problems, and a double-helping of them. It also has a lot of awesome aspects. Authoritarianism is on the rise, but the US as it currently stands is not a police state. There is so much hyperbole in US political discourse; everything is polarised and taken to extremes. Someone is a democrat|republican? Now we know everything there is to know about that individual, and they clearly support everything that one party (of only two) does!
The comment I'm arguing against is a typical sky-is-falling polarised position, and doesn't have the shades of gray that the real world does. In police states, people have their movement limited, are afraid to speak out against the government (hardly the case in the US) for fear of prison or similar, and are even afraid of talking to their neighbours due to widespread citizen informant networks. The US is a long way from that - but again, you don't have to be a police state in order to have problems.
And for certain middle-eastern racial groups the no-fly list is actually a pretty widespread concern that effects a lot of people.
10 is not a large number when you are discussing people. It is a huge number when you are discussing serious issues that are independent, each of which requires a response. It is so many most people cannot keep track of them all at once without pen and paper.
And if you are concerned with non-americans (as you should be) every statement in that list is much, much worse from your perspective.
I think the sky is falling, but it's falling slowly. A better analogy is a lobster in a pot of hot but not yet boiling water. If your lobster friend turns to you and says "this water we are in is boiling" do you respond "I took a temperature measurement and technically it's not boiling yet compared to these previous measurements, stop being hysterical" or do you say "you're right, we really need to get worried about this water temperature situation RIGHT NOW" and try to stop it?