The only control they are exercising is to ratchet up your fear level to the point that you are willing to toss your governmental structure overboard in an effort to minimize the already limited threat posed by a bunch of 14th century deluded Saladin wannabes.
They are less of a threat that any enemy of this country in the last century, yet you cower before them and plead with the State to do anything and everything to protect you. Being so pathetically weak has nothing to do with what made this country what it is.
Oh, so you are so under a threat of losing privacy to the government.
Both are a potential hindrance to my freedom. Both are a concern to me. I weigh both -- apparently, you don't.
"Oh, you are SO under a threat of being under terrorist control..."
And there's the rub. You have your head in the sand. You think because you are safe today you'll be safe five or ten years from now. You somehow believe that if we had simply knocked out the Taliban after 9/11 and then just settled down to a life of tea and backgammon that we'd never be attacked again.
I can hear you in 1938: "Germans? What can they do to *us*?"