Daily Beast: Forever Wars Won't End if the Surveillance State's Still Here. https://www.thedailybeast.com/forever-wars-wont-end-if-the-surveillance-stat... But who will lead the charge to wind down America’s domestic national security panopticon that, after decades of taxpayer funding and expansions of its opaque surveillance powers, still failed to anticipate critical developments like the rise of ISIS or Afghanistan’s swift collapse to the Taliban? "Over the past 20 years, our failures in Afghanistan have become synonymous with the overreach and blind arrogance of the War on Terror. But that didn’t just unfold on some distant desert battlefield. An equally treacherous surveillance state was built by American lawmakers right here at home"Just three weeks after President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, a Senate supermajority voted 98-1 to enact a bundle of emergency counterterrorism measures known as the USA PATRIOT Act. Among a slew of authoritarian nightmares, the Patriot Act vastly expanded the federal government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without oversight, indefinitely detain immigrants even vaguely suspected of terrorism, wiretap Americans without probable cause and compile incomparably massive databases of Americans’ internet activities and cell-phone metadata."