Addendum
You might recall the post where you railed about the long list of crimes in a new law that were subject to that law (I remember it as being the Patriot Act).
I pointed out that, in fact, this law had been on the books in that form for a long time, and that the Patriot Act made one small modification to it.
Multiply that kind of thing by hundreds, and you have the reason for all the hysteria. Of those screaming about our rights being trampled, a huge majority never bothered to check these things out for themselves, and are relying on crap being thrown around by people with huge political axes to grind.
"Vigilance" implies calm. What we've been seeing from the New York Times and the Democrats has not been "vigilance."