Among other things, the restrictions placed on how assorted law enforcement agencies go about conducting surveillance on whomever they please have been greatly diminished by the Patriot Act. The scope of the Act is overbroad and not limited solely to terrorism but the general ability of the US government to spy on its citizens. There are indeed many parts which relate solely to the prosecution of terrorism but there are similarly many sections which have no mention of terrorism whatsoever and deal with surveillance in general. In addition, several computer crimes are now classified as terrorist acts with the justification that terrorists might use hacking as one of their weapons. It definitely has nothing to do with increased security at airports.

Obviously some sort of legislation needed to be put in place to help our law enforcement deal with terrorism more effectively. The Patriot Act however, goes too far in compromising the rights of American citizens to privacy at the expense of going after terrorists. It seems to me that the scope of the act was deliberately made overbroad by right wing political opportunists who could push through legislation that undercuts civil liberties (which we all know is an agenda of the right) under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Finally while the argument "if you're not a terrorist then you've essentially got nothing to worry about" does indeed seem inherently correct, the possibility exists now more than ever that non-terrorist but suspicious activities on the part of law-abiding (or hell, even law-breaking but not terrorist) people now have a higher likelyhood of drawing scrutiny from law enforcement and the level of information which will be able to be obtained by law enforcement is that much greater. Just because someone may appear to be a terrorist does not mean they are in fact a terrorist and they deserve the same protection of the prpivacy laws of this country as anyone else. The Patriot Act erodes those protections.

I find it highly contradictory that while the right wing preaches for the reduction of the overall size of government they don't hesitate whatsoever to increase the size of military or law-enforcement agencies; and at the same time they erode through policy the legal protections citizens have from those branches. We don't live in a police state and I for one don't want this country to get a millimeter closer to becoming one.