Wow, almost don't know where to start with all this meaningless character assassination, righteous pontification and vague generalization here. But one statement really caught my eye;

This is almost exactly the opposite of reality - open and democratic societies have an advantage exactly because there is more information available - even the stuff the government doesn't want you to know about.

...if we're on the winning side.

Right, because anyone who works hard enough can have their own yacht. Go peddle your naive american dream elsewhere.

Leaving aside the stupidity of the "yeh, but they're worse" argument, you win the 'whoosh' prize for not knowing it's a quote from the movie Sneakers.

It's exactly this ambiguity in the language that's being exploited here - the banners read 'America is a Christian Nation!', but when this statement is challenged the response is 'but what that means is that most americans are Christian!'
Really, it's the same playing with the definition of words that gives us the 'but evolution is only a theory' argument, the kind of dishonest sophistry that shouldn't fool a twelve year old but seems to confuse way too many americans.

Try this example - more than 3/4 of the US is white. The vast majority of US presidents have been white and the majority of the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress are white. So would you be comfortable with the US being described as a 'white nation' or as 'a country governed by whites'?

Where on earth do you think that money comes from?
How much do you think your stocks will be worth if the workers in those companies are sick or can't get to their offices because the roads are in disrepair and the police can't protect them from robbers? How long do you think your land will stay yours when the mob come to take it from you? And just how much do you think your nice pile of shiny dollar bills wil be worth if you don't have a strong economy and government - paid for by taxes - to back it up?
So yeh, you might never meet a policeman in your life, your mansion might be totally self sufficient and you might travel around in your own private helicopter, but the richer you are the more you've benefitted from the society that tax has paid for and the more you have to lose if you try to weasel your way out of paying some back.

Creepy? Really? What exactly is 'creepy' about it?
Unless you mean 'likely to make a large section of the population feel uneasy because they've been cowed into a pathetic state of guilt and self-censorship in the face of a narrow-minded and hypocritical moral hysteria of a small minority'. Yeh you're right, that is creepy.
 

It's this kind of inflexible logic that leads to situations where if 15 year old girl sends sex photos to her 16 year old boyfriend, they run the risk of being charged and prosecuted, him as a child molester and her as a child pornographer! Two lives potentially destroyed because 'someone must have been raped'. The only one doing the raping here is the state.

One reason is that as a method of assassination drones are hugely indiscriminate, averaging about 50 non-combatant casualties for each targeted individual. This number of civilian deaths raises all kinds of legal, ethical and tactical questions.

It's also worth remembering that any time churches have been in a positions of real power, power to change and order society, they have universally repressed these things, often with extreme violence.

You're not looking hard enough. Wikipedia has also been available in Tomeraider format for a while now.