Civil Libertarians Knew This Would Happen. We Should Have Listened.

Six weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act. The vote was 357-66 in the House, and 98-1 in the Senate. Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wis.), the chamber’s lone dissenter, said later that many of his colleagues hadn’t bothered to read it.

The law granted sweeping powers to the federal government. It gave agents new authority to use on Americans and made it them around the clock. It authorized the widespread collection of citizens’ digital information without any warrant at all, and made it a crime for service providers to tell anyone what the federal government was doing. It also allowed the government to without ever giving them a trial.

questioned these new powers’ connection to 9/11. Some provisions had long been of federal law enforcement agencies, and it was not clear that the new powers would have prevented the attacks. They also cautioned that if history was any indication, the government would use the new powers primarily . They urged Americans to imagine those powers in the hands not of an altruistic and conscientious president, but one with little respect for norms, institutions or democratic principles.

The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, “lone wolves” — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters. With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.

Congress showed little resistance, regularly renewing Patriot Act provisions when they expired. The Supreme Court granted sweeping immunity to the president, the executive branch officials who worked for him and local police officers who worked on federal task forces. Both branches built loopholes into restrictions on executive power so that presidents could act decisively during national emergencies. The Supreme Court instructed lower courts to defer to the president in determining what would qualify as an emergency. Abuses of the new powers were often ignored or explained away, and the only category of federal employees to be prosecuted consistently for their crimes since Sept. 11 have been whistle blowers who have drawn attention to government abuses.

The faith we put in government over the past 25 years was, in a way, understandable. In the days after 9/11, as the country grappled with an unimaginable tragedy, the moment demanded patriotism, unity and camaraderie. As cases of alleged terrorists being killed or captured grew, and no major foreign attacks occurred at home, hawks claimed the civil liberties sacrifices were worth it. It was easy to miss the slow, steady erosion of our freedoms. When abuses did make news, we were reassured that while our presidents might make mistakes or skirt the Constitution, they did so in good faith. Our democratic process simply wasn’t capable of producing a head of state who could rule with the ambition of a tyrant.