The thing is, they don't need to follow you around the same way as in the 'old days' because, like many things, modern technology makes it easier and more efficient.
The tyranny of the future isn't going to be like that of the past. That makes it difficult to explain the dangers to people.
Rather, the risk is that surveillance, censorship, intimidation, selective law enforcement, and so on are targeted at specific political opponents --- such as Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Glenn Greenwald, Marin Luther King Jr. and so on.
Such authoritarian harassment presents a straightforward threat to democracy because it stifles political dissent.
Democracy is incompatible with the stifling of political dissent.
Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.
Anyone who has been investigated for a DWB might disagree.
Casual racism and unreasonable search and seizure have been pretty consistently tied together as a common standard in policing, not just in the U.S, but across the world. There is something in the way that police organisations operate that makes them particularly susceptible to treating racist stereotypes as probable cause.
1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim?
2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.
The obvious problem is that you get a superposition of spectrums of multiple chemicals from the sample and that the devices being cheap and fast produce "blurry" spectrums, so you get a lot of false positives.
To say that we're the only species to engage in murder and genocide is flat wrong: chimps will happily murder other chimps, even infants [1]. Maybe we're not as civilized as we think we are, and all the narratives and uniforms and laws are just theater to subsume and rationalize our animal savagery.
Nothing is ever simple, so I can't imagine this tells the whole story, but it's a big big factor, and it doesn't help anyone to ignore it.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-c...