It's much more likely, based on their behavior and activities that they've been caught doing, that they have no intention of genuinely using these powers for fighting terrorists, and instead intend to suppress domestic dissent and enhance policing powers.
It's just that they're counting on people like you to routinely show up when people point out their criminal actions and go "But what about the terrorists?"
Terrorists over the last decade (let's call it 15 years, to include 9/11) have killed fewer Americans than the lies of the president backed by secretive intelligence agencies fabricating evidence to shape politics.
They've also killed fewer Americans than trigger happy police officers.
They've killed fewer Americans - by two orders of magnitude! - than car crashes. In fact, in 2001, about an order of magnitude more people died in car crashes than in the 9/11 attacks.
The danger to the US is not terrorists, because they have a very limited capacity to cause actual harm. Instead, they rely on cowards who can't deal with being hurt without flying in to a blind panic/rage harming themselves as an after effect.
People making the arguments that you raise here do vastly more harm to the nation than terrorists ever directly could, and in fact, were a key portion of Osama bin Laden's plan to dismantle the United States - a feat he could never have hoped to accomplish directly, but which he seems to have made substantial progress at through the combination of public panic, the arguments raised by you here, and the short-sighted power grab of politicians.
Congratulations: you're raising an argument that's part of a trio of forces destroying the US at the behest of a terrorist. Far from your line of thinking stopping terrorists, you're enabling them to win, something that they could never have hoped to accomplish without assistance.