"The unspoken power dynamics in a police/civilian encounter will generally favor the police, unless the civilian is a local sports hero, the mayor, or a giant who is impervious to bullets." - Journalist Justin Peters

From time to time throughout history, individuals have been subjected to charges (and eventual punishment) by accusers whose testimony was treated as infallible and inerrant. Once again, we find ourselves repeating history, only this time, it's the police whose testimony is too often considered beyond reproach and whose accusations have the power to render one's life over.

In the police state being erected around us, the police can probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts. Making matters worse, however, police dogs - cute, furry, tail-wagging mascots with a badge - have now been elevated to the ranks of inerrant, infallible, sanctimonious accusers with the power of the state behind them. This is largely due to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in Florida V. Harris, in which the court declared roadside stops to be Constitution-free zones where police may search our vehicles based upon a hunch and the presence of a frisky canine.

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it's the Fourth Amendment being inexorably bled to death. This latest wound, in which a unanimous Supreme Court determined that police officers may use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops, comes on the heels of recent decisions by the court that give police the green light to taser defenseless motorists, strip-search nonviolent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and break down people's front doors without evidence that they have done anything wrong.

As soon as the elections were over, a wave of commentaries extolling the virtues of compromise appeared in the press. The common theme is that it is time for Democrats and Republicans alike to end partisan gridlock - to make compromises that will shrink federal deficits without driving us off "the fiscal cliff."

That said, gridlock has its defenders. They fondly remember "the good old days" in the '90s when divided government (Democratic White House, GOP Congress) produced a gridlock that kept spending increases relatively modest and eliminated budget deficits.

Gridlock today, however, is not as benign as it was then. Also, the '90s constituted a special case that cannot be replicated today.

"The game is rigged, the network is bugged, the government talks double-speak, the courts are complicit, and there's nothing you can do about it." - David Kravets, reporting for Wired

Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. This is the reality of the Internet-dependent, plugged-in life of most Americans today.

A process that started shortly after 9/11 with programs such as National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping and Total Information Awareness has grown into a full-fledged network of warrant-less surveillance, electronic tracking, and data-mining, thanks to federal agents having been granted carte blanche access to the vast majority of electronic communications in America. Their methods generally run counter to the Constitution, but no federal agency, court, or legislature has stepped up to oppose this rapid erosion of our privacy, and there is no way of opting out of this system.

Consequently, over the course of the past 12 years, Congress, the courts, and the presidents (both George W. Bush and Barack Obama) have managed to completely erode privacy in America. Complicating matters further is the fact that technology is moving so rapidly that we often find ourselves making decisions (or subjected to decisions) whose consequences we can scarcely comprehend.

"You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized." - George Orwell, 1984

Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state's steady incursions into our lives. It's coming at us with a lethal one-two punch.

To start with, there's the government's integration of facial-recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1-billion boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government's current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial-recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation's growing network of surveillance cameras, to not only track your every move but create a permanent "recognition" file on you within the government's massive databases.

By the time it's fully operational in 2014, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of "iris scans, photos searchable with face-recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos." One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13-million facial images, gleaned from "criminal mug shot photos" taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having "accumulated face-image databases that in their size dwarf the earth's population," it's only a matter of time before the government taps into the trove of images stored on social-media and photo-sharing Web sites such as Facebook.