They control and monitor your traveling, communication and associations. They'll throw you in jail for consuming certain substances. Force you to admit guilt (being guilty or not) on threat of overwhelming jail times or punishments. Justice seems more like something bought than something inherent. Large smear campaigns of anyone that would dare stand against them.
They don't monitor or control all of my traveling. Yes, there are places where my license plate will be noted. There are also places where I may be stopped by an immigration officer. On the other hand, if I headed out, right now, for a 5000 mile road trip no one would stop me or attempt to even find out why I was doing it. I could also buy a cash bus ticket, or hitchhike, or rent a car, or ride a bicycle, and they wouldn't know where I was or where I was headed.
They don't monitor or control all of my communications. I have a ham radio license and I could talk to other hams and it's exceedingly unlikely that they're monitoring all of the available EM spectrum. If your definition of control includes the miniscule licensing requirements, I could use CB radio, or FRS radio. Or cheapo open-spectrum walkie-talkies. I can send mail through private shipping companies or private couriers and it'll arrive untouched and unopened. Ironically, I'm probably more secure using a landline phone to call another landline phone, as the rules for what they're allowed to do with those are actually more strict.
I have never been approached due to my associations. I am acquainted with a man in my community that was successfully prosecuted for weapons violations, and whose organization at the time was infiltrated because of a video they made and distributed that gave practical advice for destroying large buildings with explosives. After he served his three or so years for having an assault rifle modified for full-auto fire, he's free to be associated with again, and his only significant restriction is that he's not allowed to own guns anymore. This is a man that could well have been justifiably branded as a terrorist or a member of a terrorist cell, and yet his illegal acts got him only three years off and a need to check in with a parole officer once a month, even under Janet Reno's prosecution. I don't run into him very often, but he's otherwise free to come and go as he pleases. I've also never had any issues with some of the very extreme college professors that I've had classes from, and these people are published in their extreme views.
I don't feel that I can comment on the drugs side. I've known people that have gotten busted and basically got released with misdemeanor charges, though I've heard of cases where people received much stronger sentences than their offenses justified. But, remember, the bulk of these prosecutions are at the state level, not the federal level, and are very much inconsistent from state to state. A former coworker of mine noted that in Illinois, possession of a personal quantity of marijuana would result in a civil citation like a parking ticket, as opposed to the criminal prosecution like it would see here.
As for charges, the state will file any and all charges against you that prosecutors feel are appropriate. But, it's a paper tiger in some ways. You'll note that there have been examples of late like the Casey Anthony trial and the George Zimmerman trial where the prosecution lost, even though it appeared that they had very strong cases. Plus, even though it's not as common as it should be, sometimes the authorities themselves are arrested and convicted of their crimes too. On top of that, if defendants and defense attorneys decided to start forcing prosecutions to all go to trial instead of being plead down, it would break the judiciary. There literally would not be enough time to try everyone. A lack of ability to try everyone does not strike me as a hallmark of a police state.
I'm curious as to what you mean by "smear campaign". Certainly, there have been those who've come public with something that the government has done that can be argued as illegal, but what I've noticed about the Government's efforts against people like Mr. Snowden and Mr. Manning is that it's centered around their own illegal acts in violating the nearly century-old Espionage Act of 1917, which among the rules codified and established in precedent through legal rulings, does make dissemination of such classified documents as these gentlemen have released, a Federal crime. These men knew going into this that there would be repercussions for acting as insiders on this matter, and they made the choice to do it anyway. Perhaps in the fullness of time their actions will not be seen in the negative light that they're seen in now, but fact is, they did break the law in the same way that the Rosenbergs did when they gave nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and they're fortunate that the death penalty isn't seen as the appropriate punishment for this behavior anymore.
Do I think that there needs to be reforms? Of course! There are all kinds of problems, like groping in airports, immigration checkpoints well within the country, the vacuum-recording of "metadata" from particular forms of communications, the proliferation of CCTV cameras, etc. But, those systems, those situations have developed, all of them, in the last 20 years. They've been developed in a short time and can be taken apart in a short time, and now that we see the courts and the press getting involved in rooting out what's actually going on, I expect that many of these situations will be rolled back significantly over the next couple of decades.
