When I was a kid, spy organizations were the coolest thing. (Bond, UNCLE, Control, Danger Man, etc.) Back when they were fighting communism.
I was all for the Patriot Act in the fight against terrorism, despite reservations they’d turn the snooping onto domestic politics.
It took the Obama administration to ruin all that.
In a previous era of time, the previous “One” would be hung along with his dog of a wife and mistress (gay lover I suppose in this case). This is just fantasy based on historical fact.
It was ruined far before Obama, during W. Bush. The Patriot Act was a massive turnover of authority to the intelligence and police agencies. They were already so bloated that it was hard for them to do their jobs.
A cardinal rule of bad government is to ignore the big, important things that government is supposed to do, and concentrate their efforts on minutiae and authoritarianism.
The vast amount of utterly useless and pointless data is now intermingled with and burying the small amounts of important stuff in giant digital archives, where it will never, ever be used.
Another cardinal rule of bad government is that it demands ever more money and resources, while at the same time doing less and less. It’s end game is to get all the money, yet do nothing.