George Orwell's 1984 is brilliant fiction, meant to serve as a warning to mankind, that when the very things that you think but have not acted upon, are considered to be crimes by the state, than your freedom of thought has been revoked, and thereby you are no more than a cog in the machine of the state. You would think that a country that permits the selling of the book 1984, and movies such as the "Minority Report", would not fall down the rabbit hole of supporting the prosecution of thought crimes, but in fact, that is the direction that this country is progressing towards.
The reason that the state wants to push the envelope of creating crime out of thought, is quite obviously, to control the thoughts and thinking of the population, so that they are more easily manipulated by state resources. Some people might consider that to be a good thing, that we all therefore should have banal and dull minds, but if nobody is pushing the envelope, if nobody is actually utilizing their mind in all of its grand capacity, then we have essentially sacrificed freedom, free will, free thought, in order to behave as if we were created to be servants to those that do not suffer from these same imposed limitations.
We do not know the thoughts of anybody's mind, and there is a very good reason why we do not, which is that even if we were to know the thoughts of somebody's mind, we still would not know all the things that were part of the process that created that thought in the first place; for instance, the psychological makeup of the thought, the complete understanding of the person that has the thought, the depth or doubt of the thought, the conviction of the thought, the hidden meaning of the thought, the reason for the thought, the symbolism of the thought, and so on, and so forth.
It then follows that if we cannot really know what a particular thought means, how is it possible, to know for a certainty, what a person means, when he writes something, or says something, without any real action that affirms what has been written or said. If everyone that ever said, "I'm going to kill you" went to jail for attempted murder or similar, simply for making that statement without taking into context the whole panorama of what was happening at that time, than the prisons would be overflowing with people, simply for speaking out their frustration at a particular moment, or joking at a particular manner, or similar.
The state has taken upon itself to have the power, rightly or wrongly, to monitor everything that we do on our computers, everything that we say or text on our cell phones, everyone we contact and associate with on social media, to which, obviously, if the state is with anybody 24/7, there are going to be numerous instances of thought crimes. The state more and more wants to stop crime before a crime is even committed, but unless there is real tangible evidence, that a crime is going to be committed, by that person taking overt and tangible actions to commit such a crime, than the state has obviously crossed a bridge too far.
In actuality, the state wants to make thought crime a crime, just as the state desires having so many laws upon laws on its books, so that at any time for just about any reason, people that the state considers to be a threat, can be arrested, in which, thought crime is the easiest of all crimes to pin upon an individual, because from a state perspective, thoughts can be broken down into little evil sound bites, and that distortion ensnares virtually everyone.