State of surveillance. “What's a criminal look like?”

Author here. The first submission of this essay ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11919921 ) met with the following response: >It seemed to me to be a re-hash of a number of well covered topics. It didn't appear to have anything new or present from a different perspective. > Having said that, I could have missed the interesting bits. It is quite long. If there's stuff in there that you think is insightful, I'd be interested in you pointing it out

So I've decided to repost with an outline of the high-level findings: 1) Parallel construction, over classification, gag orders, proactive suing of municipalities, and more hide surveillance from public scrutiny. 2) Surveillance tech is being deployed unevenly in America, largely against low income neighborhoods (from Stingrays to license plate readers). The aforementioned secrecy makes it hard for the EFF, ProPublica, ACLU, etc to study the deployment of such tech. 3) The federal government is, through "anti-terror grants", funding surveillance for local police, but the EFF/ACLU have found the surveillance tech is used to crack down on non-terror crimes. 4) The FBI and local police are pushing for more surveillance that doesn't involve the judicial system (warrantless surveillance), with the FBI's latest push to broaden NSLs to include personal browsing history and session information. 5) We've passed an inflection point, where law enforcement does not fear pushback from American people on civil liberties, as many Americans have become inured to the new normal.