I think you're being pedantic. No knock, no warrant, no redress when they murder you or a loved one for your family = police state, plain and simple.
To strive for accuracy, I'd go with "unaccountable oligarchy" or "faux-democratic tyrannical beauracracy". Not as punchy, admittedly. You could also call it "soft fascism".
Ultimately, we live in a new and unprecedented form of state power run wild, and while there are echoes of history, it's probably going to continue to unfold in a mostly unique way. There's no reason to forcibly apply the old labels any more than there is to call an airplane a "winged tank".
I know there has always been a strain of the paranoid (sometimes well-earned) in hacker culture, but presumably it wasn't what this site was built to highlight.
1. What attributes constitute a condition we call a "Police State"? (a list of which you already provided)
2. Does America (or some part of it) have those attributes?
3. Assuming the above is "Yes", what can we do to make it not have those attributes? (e.g. call currently elected representatives, elect representatives based on their historical opposition to those attributes, avoid certain companies or products, etc...)
4. How do we track if these actions are being performed and how effective they are?
Actually, we probably don't need to do categorize negative attributes so much. We can probably just focus on reversing the attributes we think are making our country worse.
Also, enacting political change is a skill as old as civilization I'm sure. There is probably lots of material around on how to do it effectively. We can start by reading and trying some of that stuff in place of arguing in circles about what is and isn't a police state.
(edit: formatting)
One of the reasons I generally like HN so much is because there is so much expertise around that the comments often get right to the actual heart of an issue.
A great example is something like the P ≠ NP attempted proof from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585850 The top comment is extremely informative, nearly the best commentary you could find about the issue anywhere.
Imagine if the top comment was instead from one of the numerous people who believed they had already proved P = NP or P ≠ NP, and they went off about their own theories and disparaged all of the mathematical community for ignoring them. A mathematical quack, basically.
The people who actually understand math could spend their time refuting this guy, but by doing so the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the site would go down, and with it the overall comment quality. And besides, the quack has probably heard it all before and it didn't change his mind. So instead people vote stuff like this down so that the top comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.
The problem with stories like this is that the equivalent of these mathematical quacks get voted up to the top. The natural hacker distrust for authority, which on one hand motivates good and productive work on privacy/anonymizing technologies, in this case motivates people to post comments that involve low-quality grandstanding and statements about the political situation that are objectively false. Sure it is possible to refute them, but S/N ratio is still lowered and no one's mind gets changed anyway.
By the way, I'm not someone who is downplaying the significance of Snowden's revelations. I just want to read a discussion that really cuts to the heart of the issues, instead of generic outrage, vague calls to action, and outright inaccurate statements like calling the US a police state.
Just because it's far from your reality doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else. People are constantly bombarded with articles about the US engaging in potentially illegal and unconstitutional activities that affects a lot of internet users, so it's only natural people get upset about it and let their emotions run wild, thus resulting in the "paranoid" comments that we now regularly see.
You should take the time to show these people an alternate point of view, because your comment will not only be read by the person you're replying to (who may or may not change his mind), but also by the thousands of lurkers who don't even participate in the discussion.
And yet instead of the usual 100% noise of naive brogrammer narrow political relativism, you are seeing some more interesting replies from people who say they have actually lived in police states and that this is where things are heading.
Yuck is right. The truth is yucky. "The truth will set you free, but it's gonna piss you off first"
I am beyond happy and proud of HN for keeping such a discourse about these issues! I have so much more respect for the HN community for keeping these issues on the front page and having such a sober view of their implications!
It's exceptionally naive to think that these issues are not related to what HN is all about: technology startups; what if your going to build "the next google" - clearly then you will come face to face with some MIB demanding access to your users data. If you don't pay attention to what's going on now, and develop an understanding of how grave this situation is, you'd never be in a position to build the future without furthering an actual police state.
The world is being steamrollered by the interests of the .001% and there is no reason why it has to be that way.
Edit: minor grammatical changes
Sober views like calling the U.S. a police state? The train where hn had a high-quality discussion about U.S. surveillance and national security policy left the station long, long ago. It was about the time we were getting minute-by-minute postings on the exact position of an airplane seat that didn't contain Edward Snowden.
While you might say that things are "not that bad" - just because you hav some relative "comfort" (so long as you're not against the State) - does not mean that the actual architecture of the system is not that of a police state.
The US became a police state as soon as the CIA did its coup of the executive branch. Now, when this actually occurred is debatable - but my opinion is that they succeeded 100% once GHW Bush took the VP spot as Reagan's handler.
This coup was a LONG time in the making -- and goes all the way back to Prescott, but ever since 1980 - every president has been a puppet of GHW Bush and the CIA.
If you're interested in sources and history, we can discuss further...
Clinton was brought into the CIA fold after his complicity to allowing CIA drug importation to Mena Arkansas.
Here is a brief clip where Clinton does not deny any of the allegations of the trafficking - he simply attempts to deny any awareness of it.
Watch the Mena Connection....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDMktUYvC7k
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There is a lot more to it as well.
It probably started with Latin American countries (CIA coups, Smedley Butler), vietnam, Iran (Shaw), Afghanistan (when the CIA radicalized them to fight the russians), etc. Ike warned of the MIC, and he was right. Now we're turning the lens inward, as the empire is totally insolvent.
And I'm still very much annoyed that, as a foreigner who happens to have American customers and business partners, I'm told I have no reason to worry if the USG is watching my work, my personal activities and my relationships. I'd be just as annoyed if another entity was doing the spying and the posterior use of the information to punish me.
So I cannot understand why HN—a site for startup founders, programmers, tech business owners, and people working in technology—wouldn't be a place to discuss an entity watching our actions with the implicit threat of selective punishment.
I worry about some stranger getting access to our customer data. Why wouldn't I worry about a government, be it the US or any other country, getting access to that data?
I don't think that it is largely speaking that people who always thought that the US is a police state have suddenly appeared on HN, but more that people on HN who didn't previously think that the US was a police state are changing their minds.
The US has the worlds highest incarceration rate per capita than any other country and has just been caught running a global surveillance network that would make even the Stasi blink. To not use the term police state when discussing all of this would be weirder.
Perhaps if you come up for air (and sun, it's good for you) you'll see that discussion about police states is both relevant and extremely important at this time. Many people don't want to dive head-first off the cliff with you.