A ranking of electronic police states

The worldwide-operating Chicago-based Internet security and privacy protection company Cryptohippie USA, Inc. has released a ranking of what they call "electronic police states":

https://secure.cryptohippie.com/pubs/EPS-2008.pdf

As I suggested earlier, their research confirms that the United Kingdom ranks by now as the most highly developed police state in Europe, leading even the United States in this regard. Both the UK and US, at positions 5 and 6, respectively, rank only marginally better than such communist or formerly communist abodes of unfreedom as China and North Korea, Belarus and Russia (1 and 2, 3 and 4).

Further cause for concern should be the fact that other core countries of the European Union, namely France and Germany, also rank in the top ten. It stands to reason that the EU as a whole will swiftly catch up with the big three member states.

As the authors of the study explain, "[t]he usual image of a 'police state' includes secret police dragging people out of their homes at night, with scenes out of Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR. The problem with these images is that they are horribly outdated. That's how things worked during your grandfather's war – that is not how things work now.

"The electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine. [...]
[E]very surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping ... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it – the evidence is already in their database.

"Do you [...] trust [...] every government worker and every policeman? And, if some leader behaves badly, will you really stand up to oppose him or her? Would you still do it if he had all the emails you sent when you were depressed? Or if she has records of every porn site you've ever surfed? Or if he knows every phone call you've ever made? Or if she knows everyone you've ever sent money to? Such a person would have all of this and more – in the form of court-ready evidence – sitting in a database, waiting to be organized at the touch of a button.

"This system hasn't yet reached its full shape, but all of the basics are in place and it is not far from complete [...]. It is too late to prevent this – it is here. Our purpose in producing this report is to let people know that their liberty is in jeopardy and to help them understand how it is being undermined."

Factors taken into account for this comparative ranking include, among others, requirements for national identity documents (i.e. biometric passports), inspections at borders and searches of computers, mandatory decryption of data and prohibition or restriction of data encryption, financial tracking, ISP and phone data retention, data storage and search ability by state authorities (i.e. police and intelligence agencies), as well as "covert hacking" ("State operatives removing – or adding! – digital evidence to/from private computers covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone appear as any kind of criminal desired").