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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

Can we please repeal the Patriot Act or Freedom Act or whatever it is called now? It’s been a one-way ticket down the toilet since this travesty was foisted on the stupid scared populace of 2001. I really frame my life in America in two sections, before and after the planes hit the Twin Towers. Not because of the tragedy which it was, but because that is when the America that I know changed and started becoming twisted. Optimism gone, privacy gone, thinking gone, replaced by fear and ignorance and lowest common denominator politics and TV.

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The most important parts of the patriot act have already been repealed during the trump administration. Major parts of the bill weren't renewed back in 2020 IIRC.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/yes-section-215-expire...

Any politician running on a platform to repeal the Patriot act et al would have my vote, regardless of party and almost without regard to any other positions they hold.

When the act was first passed, most of us really wanted some kind of sunset provision to be included. At the very least “once the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq came to a close” clause. You could already, even then, see federal agencies salivating at the carte Blanche lack of oversight.

We had been driving this country on fear and ignorance for a long time before that. You might be recalling a brief period of post Cold War dotcom boom, but even that was marked by a deep divisiveness fomented by the 24 hour news cycle and a disdain for bipartisanship.

The TSA is the result of a brief moment of unity where we decided we feared someone else more than each other. Eliminating it might save money and simplify travel, but it won't touch the fear and ignorance.

Whatever optimism we had died during Vietnam, if not long before that.

you think the Patriot Act is just the TSA?

The Patriot Act was a renamed law (several laws actually) that the the FBI/CIA/NSA had been trying to get passed for decades, it was a wish list for them that was rubber stamped shredding what little protections left in the constitution

i used to think it was 9/11; lately i’ve come to realize that, no, it’s just that i wasn’t alive for the same bullshit that has come before.

I do think that we crossed some lines post 9/11. It's likely that the US had always been violating the constitution by spying on American citizens, or were engaging in torture or secreting people off to black sites and indefinitely detaining them without trial, but after 9/11 it was all out in the open. It was sanctioned by the government. It became policy.

In the decades before 9/11 the US government had the decency to lie to the American public about it. They told us that America was so great because it would never do those kinds of things. Those types of activities were held up as examples of horrible atrocities communist nations subjected their citizens to.

Even as evidence came up from time to time showing that the US government didn't always live up to those ideals they continued to be expressed as what this country stood for. Post 9/11 that was no longer the case. This might be a more honest American government, but I can't help feeling like we've lost something.

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