I certainly get the "cheap sci-fi novel" feeling reading a lot of commentary on the Internet. But honestly, taking a step back and looking at what's actually happening puts things in a much different perspective and makes comments about living in a dystopian future seem more than a little silly.
Look at the David Miranda situation. The Internet reaction about living in a police state was immediate, but the rhetoric didn't seem to match what really happened (at least to me). A non-UK citizen (as far as I'm aware) was transporting classified information through a UK airport almost certainly for the purposes of releasing that information, information the UK government considers damaging if it was to be released. The information is confiscated, but the man himself is let go. And afterwards, the man's journalist husband more or less openly threatens the UK government with the release of more classified information in retaliation. That's not quite how I remember sci-fi police state stories usually going.
Well, the whole affair sounds a bit like a he-said, she-said. There are claims that Mr. Miranda was a courier and that they offered a lawyer and water during the 9 hour ordeal. The law office, which represents Mr. Miranda categorically denies that legal representation was ever offered to him, for example.
Now, I don't know the truth, but even assuming he had documents they wanted to get their hands on, or files on his devices that they thought pertinent they could have handled the whole thing in 30 minutes max and then let him go on his merry way.
That they held him - almost to the minute - for the legal maximum of 9 hours looks not only vindictive it looks as if they indeed intended to send a message.
Put that into context with other documented occurrences, like the totally senseless destruction of hardware and sandbagging the Guardian into this action (and yes, The Guardian has here more credibility then the UK government, which denies any threats, but that's just me) and we get a whole other picture.
While totalitarian police state may be an over exaggeration , we should be very careful about the direction this is going into.
Assume you're a journalist and suddenly the government(s) have a truckload embarrassing material on you (from Google searches, Facebook accounts, Skype calls and whatever your friendly operating system leaks directly to the NSA's vacuum cleaners) to directly blackmail you.
And no, I don't consider myself a member of the black helicopter faction, but nevertheless find those developments extremely worrying.
If you changed the story to be a known drug dealers wife, it isn't that out of line. Can Miranda clearly say he has NEVER TRANSPORTED leaked documents or known where his partner keeps them? Really? Even more so, can he prove his partner has never tried to use him as a mule to pass confidential information across international borders?
This was just like grabbing a drug dealers wife hoping the drug dealer was just a little too greedy and his stuff in her packages.
The Guardian's lawyer eventually got to see Miranda an hour before he was released.
The Guardian destroyed their own laptops rather than handing them over the to security services (my reading is the security services were concerned about the laptops falling into the wrong hands)
I don't like the way the UK government has behaved but the Guardian is omitting things in it's reports and that leads to questions about its credibility too.
One key part of the story is that the UK government basically accused Miranda (and Greenwald and Poitras) of aiding terrorists by intending to publish that classified information. That's a hairsbreath away from the charge of aiding the enemy that Manning was (just barely?) found innocent of in the US.
I think that defining news reporting to be aiding the enemy is pretty darn close to a lot of what one sees in sci-fi police states.
So a government can apply terrorism law to a person having information that's damaging to its interests?
That certainly looks like police state to me. And I'm not even mentioning the 9 hours detention, not needed at all to recover the damaging information.
Let's say you were the british security services, you didn't like Greenwald, and you wanted to show him who was boss. And his partner was travelling through an airport.
Look at the David Miranda situation. The Internet reaction about living in a police state was immediate, but the rhetoric didn't seem to match what really happened (at least to me). A non-UK citizen (as far as I'm aware) was transporting classified information through a UK airport almost certainly for the purposes of releasing that information, information the UK government considers damaging if it was to be released. The information is confiscated, but the man himself is let go. And afterwards, the man's journalist husband more or less openly threatens the UK government with the release of more classified information in retaliation. That's not quite how I remember sci-fi police state stories usually going.