I don't pretend to be a "Patriot Act scholar" but I know this:

1. Everyone on this board had and has some degree of negative feelings regarding the Patriot Act and considerers it at best an extreme measure for extreme times.

2. No serious abuses have come to light.

3. We are an open society and problems are next to impossible to cover up. Do you think prisoner abuses would have surfaced under the old (even present) Russian government?

Power in an open society is relative. Any one of several Presidents could have used popularity with the military to suspend Congress and make himself a dictator. Nixon might have had a better than even chance of pulling it off but in the end he yielded to the system.

In an open society like ours you can't abduct thousands of citizens and expect it to go unnoticed. Some Islamic web sites say that we are losing thousands of troops every day and the coffins are choking our ports. How ridiculous is that?

Even in a closed society like Argentina, the "missing" did not go unnoticed. In this country we now have "Amber Alerts" for every single missing child and we do not ignore the disappearance of adults.

There is nothing wrong with opposing the Patriot Act. For balance, we need people to oppose it but making outrageous claims does nothing but trivialize your position.