We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens when you give the government broad powers and allow government agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.

Indeed, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these newly revealed privacy violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that the government's Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of the NSA's vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse and depository for every imaginable kind of information - whether innocent or not, private or public - including communications, transactions, and the like. In fact, anything and everything you've ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning - phone calls, Facebook posts, Tweets, Google searches, e-mails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc. - will be tracked, collected, catalogued, and analyzed by the UDC's supercomputers and teams of government agents.

By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data-collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for "innocent" reasons, surveillance of all citizens gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options - denies freedom of choice - and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.

(Editor's note: After this commentary was submitted, the Save Audubon School coalition announced developer interest in the site.)

Does the Statue of Liberty pay her own way? Does the Chicago Public Library make money? The Rock Island City Council would have you think they ought to. Despite hearing overwhelming testimony in favor of retaining Audubon School, six council members voted on May 13 to destroy a 1923 historic treasure that has educated five generations of students in Rock Island. The building had been designated a city landmark until the city council stripped the designation to make way for a chain grocery store. This is terribly short-sighted and ignores this site's value to the neighborhood that surrounds it and to the entire city. The school must be saved.

(Editor's note: This essay is a response to this commentary.)

The scene in Boston on April 18 and 19 was awesome.

By that, I don't mean it was cool. Rather, the mass law-enforcement action to shut down the city and search for the brothers Tsarnaev was "awesome" in the dictionary sense of "awe": "dread ... and wonder that is inspired by authority."

In his commentary in the May 2 issue of the River Cities' Reader, John W. Whitehead announces that the situation showed that "the police state has arrived." Certainly, anybody who's doubted warnings about the police state should have been struck by the swiftness, scope, coordination, and force of law-enforcement actions those two days following the bombs that exploded at the April 15 Boston Marathon. Even though television viewers didn't see much beyond reporters breathlessly saying that something was happening, it was readily apparent that the combined resources of federal, state, and local law enforcement are a fearsome instrument that can be unleashed quickly and without regard for rights.

So if you have the misfortune of seeing your picture above "Suspect Number 1" or "Suspect Number 2" on TV, I hope you did something truly evil, as this is the man- and firepower you'll face. And if you decline to let police search your home in a scenario similar to what happened in Boston, good luck.

But this was not a "police state" as most people think of it - a brutal, proactively oppressive regime. It would be more accurate to say that the Boston metro area on April 18 and 19 was a vivid demonstration of our potential for a police state through a single, short-lived, but widespread instance of de facto martial law.

Yet it was also a visible reminder of a more persistent underlying condition: the security state that has been built steadily in the United States since September 11, 2001. It's ostensibly designed to prevent terrorist attacks, but it proved last month that it's much more adept at responding to them.

Boston showed what our police state could look like. Now we need to decide whether it's what we want.

The 10th anniversary of the start of America's illegal and aggressive war against Iraq should not pass without recalling that the mainstream news media eagerly participated in the Bush administration's dishonest campaign for public support. It is no exaggeration to say that most news operations were little more than extensions of the White House Office of Communications. Abandoning even the pretense of an adversarial relationship with the government, the media became shameful conduits for unsubstantiated and outright false information about Saddam Hussein's alleged threat to the American people. Included among the falsehoods were reports that Saddam had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, had trained al-Qaeda fighters, and had attempted to obtain uranium ore and aluminum tubes for nuclear bombs.

Put bluntly, the disastrous invasion of Iraq - which was sold on the basis of lies told by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others - might not have happened without the enthusiastic help of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and others. The blood of more than a hundred thousand - perhaps more than a million - Iraqis and 4,500 Americans is on their hands, too.