Just to put this level of paranoia in some perspective, Stalin's purges hit a massive 1% of the population. 8 million is 2.5%.

This is so paranoid that it is hard to comprehend. If you think that 2.5% of the population is out to get you, then you should probably be very carefully considering the possibility that the problem is actually you.

His purges, yes. But that is far more extreme than keeping a file on someone, so I don't think it's a good comparison.

But consider the political monitoring - certainly a vastly higher number were likely considered potential risks to be registered "just in case" under Stalins regime as wel.

I don't know if there are any estimates of the number of people under active surveillance and "on lists" in the Soviet Union, but consider the East German Stasi, which at one point at least had 2.5% of the population of DDR acting as informants (this is a reasonably conservative estimate), and had files on about 1/3 of the total population of the DDR.

Even more than 2.5% if you exclude children and people over 65.

Why would you exclude senior citizens? AKA one of the most politically active demographics in the country.

Seniors don't riot.

However, they do break into secure nuclear weapons facilities....

Or insecure nuclear weapons facilities, in that case.

During recent riots in Turkey seniors were supporting younger protesters - bringing food, offering medical help etc.

And? Rioting is not the sole source of "threats to national security".

Indeed older people often form the intellectual leadership for all sorts of movements/organisations, good and bad. Especially in cultures that have maintained their respect for elders.

It's not just the US government - many national governments have been known to keep lists like that over the year.

In Norway it turned into a major scandal in the 90's when it was revealed the security services had lists of people to be considered detained in the case of war (implicitly the assumption was a war with the Soviet Union, since the list only had left wing activists though it indiscriminately included left wing activists who where aggressively anti-Soviet, which tells you something of the mindset), and plans for using sports arenas or other suitably large enclosed spaces to lock in such high risk people as Berge Furre, a lecturer in theology, historian and MP for the Socialist Left party ("left wing" reformists/social democrats rather than revolutionaries) - not exactly a hardened revolutionary.

When the government started investigating this along with widespread illegal surveillance, he was a member of the commission in charge of the investigation (the Lund commission), and it was soon uncovered that the security services again started illegally investigating him while he was investigating them. Shows just how little respect you can expect organisations like this to have for law and democracy.

Not trusting the government was a founding principle.

There were some mixed opinions on it, though; the U.S. founders also didn't necessarily oppose measures to put down civil unrest. For example, they explicitly wrote into the Constitution a provision that the federal government may suspend habeas corpus "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it".

Of course, not everyone agreed: Jefferson opposed that clause in the Constitution. But Samuel Adams would've gone further and prescribed the death penalty for anyone rebelling against the United States, drawing a distinction between rebellion against monarchical governments, which he felt was justified, and rebellion against republics, which he felt was not.

And yet this program was reported set up under that champion of limited government, Ronald Reagan.

But does that mean the government by definition doesn't trust the people that put them into power in the first place?

Have you read the constitution? Is the electoral college a sign of great trust?

Sir, your people is a great beast. -- a.h.