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What does the PATRIOT Act mean to you? If you try to refinance your house, in most cases, the amount of paperwork has gone up at least 50%. Apparently, we're more security if Al Qaeda can't purchase condominiums in Sarasota, Florida.
That's the sort of trivial, brainless response to 9/11 that's all to commonplace, but might be relatively innocuous. However, this anecdote from Armchair Generalist is anything but harmless. What does it mean if you can't perform any standard transaction, such as paying off your automobile loan, without having to endure intrusive scrutiny? How many other private organizations than your bank and your phone company are willing to act as de facto arms of the US government's surveillance apparatus?
We've quickly entered a world in which the federal government claims sweeping powers to monitor US citizens, then hands off much of the actual monitoring to private corporations. If you throw in the government's claim that the Justice Department lacks the clearances needed to investigate how this surveillance is being conducted, you have a program with no effective control or accountability. Once you lose people like John Robb, who is about as dedicated to the defeat of terrorists as you can get, you've pretty much lost the core of informed observers who might have suspended disbelief about the effectiveness of these programs.
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