What is a police state?

I would argue that it is a country in which all rights are sublimated to increasing the capabilities of the state security apparatus to conduct any business that it desires without impediment.

No bothersome warrants, no consideration of the rights of the accused, torture, no privacy, etc.

Cases in point:

• FBI intends to assemble a massive database of physical characteristics of people, including retinal and iris scans, palm prints, and tattoos.
• Of course my initial response to the idea of a database of tattoos was, “Why bother. Just tattoo numbers on people’s wrists. It worked so well the last time out.”
• And then we have some crypto-fascist at DHS who wants to require Real ID cards to track people’s cold medication purchases. I understand that pseudoephedrin can make meth, but this is insane.
• Of course, in a police state, you have to have massive prisons stuffed to the gills with people, so AG Mukasey wants congress to act because people who got disproportionate sentences under the racist crack laws might will get out earlier under the new sentencing guidelines.
• Dude, that was the whole idea of changing the guidelines. The disproportionate sentencing was deliberately racist, and demonstrably so, and this is why they want it changed. Rockefeller style drug laws have proved a failure. All it’s left the US with is the greatest proportioned of imprisoned in the world.
• Finally, we are requiring permission for USA citizens to return to the US.
  

  Under new regulations and procedures announced to take effect over the next month, citizens of the USA will, for the first time, be required to obtain USA government permission in order to return home to their own country from abroad — from anywhere else in the world, by air or sea or land.

  On no other aspect of the right to travel is international law more clear than on the right of return to the country of one’s own citizenship: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.” The new regulations are a flagrant violation of the obligations of the USA as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other international human rights treaties, as well as a violation of the Constitutional duty of the USA government to treat such treaties as the highest law of the land.

I want my country back.