The Patriot Reactionary

I've been unimpressed by the criticisms of the Patriot Act, largely because I suspected that a lot of it was crying "Wolf," and that, in John Ashcroft's words, "The Department of Justice has neither the staffing, the time, nor the inclination to monitor the reading habits of Americans." Making the Patriot Act into an Orwellian juggernaut is Procrustean goofiness. We might be able to construct a system similar to that in 1984 with the aid of computers, but is it really surveillance if no human ever looks and acts upon private activities?