In recent years, American citizens have suffered increasing civil rights infringements.

Since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government has put average Americans under intense surveillance as part of terrorism investigations. According to a survey released in December 2006, two thirds of Americans believe that the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on their privacy rights (The Washington Post, December 13, 2006). A report from the U.S. Justice Department, dated April 28, 2006, disclosed that its use of electronic surveillance and search warrants in national security investigations jumped 15 percent in 2005. According to the report, the FBI issued 9,254 national security letters in 2005, covering 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal foreign residents. The Justice Department said the data did not include what probably were thousands of additional letters issued to obtain more limited information about some individuals or letters that were issued about targets who were in the U.S. illegally (The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2006). Reports show a Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 Jihadist web sites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active (MSNBC News Service, May 4, 2006). An internal memo of the FBI shows that the agency has spent resources gathering information on antiwar and environmental protesters and on activists who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless. In the United States, the government has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. According to USA TODAY, more employers feel they have justifiable reason to pry, track workers' whereabouts through Global Positioning System (GPS). satellite, implant employees with microchips with their knowledge and hire private investigators to check up on what employees are really doing at work. According to a study by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, 76 percent of companies monitor employees' website connections, 65 percent block access to specific sites, and 36 percent track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages (USA TODAY, November 7, 2006).

As The Associated Press reported on January 4, 2007, a signing statement attached to postal legislation by U.S. administration may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. An internal review of the U.S. State Department has found that U.S. officials screened the public statements and writings of private citizens for criticism of the administration before deciding whether to select them for foreign speaking projects. The vetting practice, The Washington Post said, appears to have been part of the administration's pattern of controlling information, muffling dissenting views (The Washington Post, November 2, 2006). On May 23, 2006, Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S.-based organization committed to protecting citizens' privacy, accused the FBI for undercutting the intent of the privacy law, saying the agency has built a database with more than 659 million records culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources (http://www.eff.org/press/, Aug. 30, 2006).

The United States touts itself as the "beacon of democracy," but the U.S. mode of democracy is in essence one in which money talks.

In 2004, candidates for the House of Representatives who raised less than $1 million had almost no chance of winning, USA TODAY quoted a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics as saying in a report on October 29, 2006. The average successful Senate campaign cost $7 million, it said. In 2006, all state campaigns in the United States were predicted to cost about $2.4 billion. In California, the oil and tobacco industries were the year's two biggest spenders with a total of $161.6 million, and they became the two biggest winners (The Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2006). In the House race in Pennsylvania, the National Republican Congressional Committee spent $3.9 million, mostly in ads against Democratic candidate Lois Murphy, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $3 million against Republican candidate Jim Gerlach (The Baltimore Sun, November 6, 2006). Seventy-four percent of respondents to a new Opinion Research poll say the U.S. Congress is generally out of touch with average Americans, as CNN reported on October 18, 2006, and 79 percent of the surveyed say they feel big business does have too much influence over the administration's decisions.