As it is, there is a long-standing tendency that government personnel focus on easy targets rather than important ones, and use any new powers they get to go after more easy targets while continuing to ignore important ones.
Didn't 9/11 make that point? In the 1970s, Democrats gutted the CIA and FBI. The agencies were forbidden to share information. (Democrats were trying to hide, and did hide, where the New Left got its money). All the Patriot Act does is take us back, partway, to what American Federal law enforcement was before the Church hearings. We were not a police state then and we are not one now.
"We should dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick." ...Cong. Ron Dellums, Chairman House Armed Services Committee. 1993
The Patriot Act undoes what Dellums, the ACLU and other Rats did. The Left is up to its usual propaganda. Bad, bad Patriot Act. Everyone knows the Patriot Act is bad. But no one can cite specifics. No one can say how it has impacted their live or the life of anyone they know--because it hasn't. All we get are vague claims about Hillary maybe getting into office and using it. As if the lack of a law would stop Hillary and other Rats from doing whatever they want.
This is the fourth time Rats have mounted a similar campaign. The first was against the Palmer raids after WWI. Thousands of bolshevik aliens were deported. The ACLU was founded as a result of that and was effective in preventing further prosecutions of domestic subversion. The second was during the 1950s when Rats used McCarthy as a bogeyman to shut down investigation of traitors in the Democrat party. The third was during and after Watergate when Rats, as I mentioned, didn't want anyone to find out the peace movement had been funded by the KGB. We see the fourth campaign today. And, as in the other three instances, some conservatives who should know better are buying it.