It is very difficult not to go crazy, having faced an unexpected threat to life (how exaggerated it may be). In the wake of 9/11, Sen. Feingold was the sole person sane enough to oppose an absurd restriction to civil liberty of free expression. As he notes, free speech is the foundation of American democracy. It is not some kind of measure that can be compromised for a bigger goal, because it is the very value that the policies seek to protect. And free expression can only function when it is not intimidated by extraordinary surveillance and the resulting punishment. Though not directly prohibiting free expression itself, it has the power to clog the information flow by making people self-censor.
However, let's leave all the civil liberties talk and privacy matter aside, since it's so obvious anyway. My question is, where will a regime run by information surveillance ultimately lead to? Surveillance from the government, if known to the public, can prime a domino of many surveillances. If somebody can always intercepts my communication and make backups of it to use it against me, then I must also make my own backups of everything so that there can be no faked data. Even when implementing ways to obscure my own communication traces, my backups must exist just in case. And the commercial sectors will also want to make use of (more) surveillance, since surveillance is being justified as something necessary rather than an intrusion to privacy. The results? A bureaucracy hell where everybody starts recording everything for no particular reason.
Of course the imminent intrusion to privacy and civil liberties is a profound matter. But the long aspect of the PATRIOT act can be that unlimited surveillance itself will be regarded as something natural, to be followed by everyone.
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