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.
Well said.
What I was referring to was the shattering of my illusions.