The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption.

-Chris Hedges from http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/locking_out_the_voices_of_dissent_20130714/

That “demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law”  is the scary part of this administration’s tacit approval and ACTUAL support of draconian crackdowns on dissent.  It really makes a mockery of any talk of how we honor freedom in America.  Of course,  that’s almost always been the mythology of America,  and EVERYTHING is brought back to “in the name of freedom”, which we now see being taken away.  This isn’t a mythological fear of “they’ll be coming for our guns”,  but actual laws with wiggle room to declare any activist a “terrorist”,  and remove the remaining freedoms and give the government carte blanche allowance to define you as an enemy of the state.  Sounds more like Rome every day.

Hedges says it best here:  “If we remain passive, if we permit the state to continue to use the law to take away our right of political expression, we will have no legal protection of resistance when we will need it most.”