The gloom and doom types like to claim that it is trivial for the almighty Feds to find out everything about every one, look inside the souls of all of us, separate the good from the evil and unerringly punish the evil. Omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. Oddly enough, this claim is often made by people who, otherwise, don't believe in God.
not sure if you are referring to TCM here as a "gloom and doom" type. but it seems that we ought to be able to design a government that does not rely on the supposed inherent incompetence of bureacrats and or humans in general for security of the citizen. in other words, your general argument that "see!! feds are really STUPID!! they wouldn't be SMART enough to infringe on your rights!!" is a pretty lame argument overall.
But this article on citizenship revocation gives lie to this claim of state power.
state power in the US, as it stands currently. but what the past shows is that government can change abruptly. it only matters who is in power. I think what people here are worried about are abrupt changes in the government, which can happen quite fast with e.g. new laws that are legislated. there are plenty of cases where the entire government has changed radically *without* even law changes. the manipulation of the ITAR and e.g. the recent changing in policy relative to the amount of money that is reported to FinCEN by banks are good examples. the government can change its mind on a dime. Citizenship applicants have submitted vast quantities of information
about themselves to the Feds. They have undergone years of a staged and complex process to move from nonresident alien to resident alien to citizen. At every point, they NARCed themselves out in detail directly to the federal government. And yet, that same government can't even tell if these people are "criminals."
If they can't efficiently surveil and regulate this group, what chance do they have to regulate and surveil the other 260 million of us?
a totalitarian state is quite possible, although difficult to conceive of. it's a problem that some people are interested in solving. what is most difficult is an "invisible tyranny" in which the inhabitants are not even aware of their imprisonment, and perhaps even defend such a situation. a system that we live in right now, imho. (but to elaborate on this would rely on conspiracy theories)