Phone and e-mail surveillance, databases for dissidents, threat assessments, terror watch lists, militarized police, SWAT-team raids, security checkpoints, lockdowns, roadside strip searches: There was a time when any one of these encroachments on our Fourth Amendment rights would have roused the public to outrage. Today, such violations are shrugged off matter-of-factly by Americans who have been assiduously groomed to accept the intrusions of the police state into their private lives.
via “We the Prisoners”: The Demise of the Fourth Amendment.
Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now – more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology – than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.