Is your state a leader in surveillance, is it an Electronic Police State? Don't you think you should find out before it's too late. The following short extract was taken from http://secure.cryptohippie.com/pubs/EPS-2010.pdf where you can read the full report. I strongly suggest you do!!!
DEFINITIONS
For those who are new to the Electronic Police State Report, we will re-state our definitions:
An electronic police state is characterized by this:
State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.
The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:
1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally (“preventively”) and only later organized for use in prosecutions.
In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email sent, every Internet site surfed, every post made, every check written, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and all are held in searchable databases. The individual can be prosecuted whenever the government wishes.
Long-term, the Electronic Police State destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and other liberties. Worse, it does so in a way that is difficult to identify.
METHODOLOGY
We moved to a more elaborate ranking system this year. The categories remained the same, but we have now weighted each one according to its importance. (The weighting factors are shown in parenthesis for each category itemized below.) Within each category we used a comparative method of assigning value.
We have not taken into account how many people, or what percentage of people, are affected by each characteristic. So, even though very few people in North Korea have Internet access, those who do are subjected to very serious surveillance. The low number of users has no effect on the national ranking.
In addition, it is significant to note that we are not measuring government censorship of Internet traffic or police abuses, as legitimate as these issues may be. Nor are we including government corruption.
Note also that none of our categories apply to evidence-gathering by traditional, honest police work. (Searches only with warrants issued by an independent judge, after sufficient examination of evidence.)
