Parallels

Think carefully about this. The US government has told you that it needs to protect its citizens from dangerous outside aggressors, and that the way to do that is by being able to listen to their phone calls and read their mail without consulting any kind of court, and without leaving any sort of public record to allow for accountability, because the president has said he wants to make sure a public inquiry "doesn't tell the enemy what we're doing."

Fact: this government has demanded to know what its citizens read, and has taken the broadest possible definition to claim what is reasonable.

`DEFINITION. -Section 2510 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by...

(C) by inserting at the end the following:
��(19) �foreign intelligence information� means...
��(B) information, whether or not concerning a United States person, with respect to a foreign power or foreign territory that relates to:
��(i) the national defense or the security of the United States; or
��(ii) the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.��.`
(Source, Deparment of Justice, Text of the USA PATRIOT Act.)

Fact: the executive branch of this government has constructed an extra-legal prison in which it can detain people who fall within the ill-defined "Enemy Combatants" group, without access to outside oversight or appeal, and has demonstrated a willingness to detain its own citizens in defiance of the rulings of American courts. (Yale Law Journal, Policy Comment...)

From what I can see, this policy is different from China's, Libiya's, Pinochet-era Chile's, Saddam-era Iraq's, and the Stalinist USSR's in only two respects: it's being enacted internationally, and for some reason the people who are most certain to be targeted don't seem to mind.