The lone vote against the Patriot Act

Trump's massive surveillance state and attacks on our civil liberties wouldn't have been possible without the PATRIOT Act. Watch this prescient warning from Russ Feingold, the only Senator to vote against its passage after 9/11.

In the months after 9/11, Congress hastily passed unconstitutional laws like the Patriot Act that supercharged the mass surveillance state we're fighting against today. 25 years later, it's time to rein in the government's out-of-control spying and reclaim our right to privacy.

The degree to which 9/11 completely normalized our surveillance state is wild—it is sometimes genuinely hard to remember how different the world was before the PATRIOT Act.

Freedom Fries. The Patriot Act. “How dare you criticize the President.”

The reason why this Onion article is so poignant is not because it predicted the future, but because it accurately captured what the discourse was like. Critics of the patriot act and the Iraq war were just pointing out the blisteringly obvious, and they were just outright dismissed.

And the Patriot Act allowed FBI agents to enter Muslim people’s homes, snoop around and leave without telling anyone, much less getting permission. In the YEARS after 9/11, life was very, very shitty for pretty much any Middle Eastern person, especially if they were Muslim. Hate crimes skyrocketed.

"The bill would also preempt some state AI laws, the four people told POLITICO." Clearly they are trying to nullify the NY and CA laws. The mood feels like right before passing the PATRIOT Act because we had to "do something" about security. www.politico.com/news/2026/09...

I was there. "That shared bond..."--unless you were brown-skinned. Lets not gloss things over. The "shared bond" passed the Patriot Act and we're still paying the price. It was a horrible time and we made some very, very big mistakes out of fear. That is worth remembering.

and yeah the anniversary of 9/11 is hard for me because it also spurred the Patriot Act, which fast tracked my dad deportation. and he died this year and in between I got to be on campus with people who now caused a lot of the damage we see now.... as they erase what made NYC NYC

Current domestic fascism is a direct consequence of the War on Terror and lack of accountability for it. 9/11 directly lead to the creation of ICE, DHS, the Patriot Act, and the erosion of civil liberties. Current abuses of power are an example of bringing the war home in so many ways: 🧵

They had the Patriot act ready to go in a little over a month after the attacks because it was a laundry list of all the shit the pro-surveillance state people wanted. It still kills me how little dissent there was from our supposed representatives. Russ Feingold was brave as hell.

There are so many goddamn stories like this that when Congress passed the Patriot Act, they included a section condemning the racism and hate that Muslims, Sikhs, and other groups experienced and asserting their rights as Americans!

today marks the 25th anniversary of the worst thing that has ever happened in america (conception of the patriot act, tsa, and homeland security)

Yep. The Patriot Act & Homeland Security Act gave power to the feds to beef up surveillance - including access to people's library records. A lot of public librarians have fought against it. Homeland Security Act also created ICE. We're still living with all of it. We lost our damn minds in 2001.

"Actually metabolizing the grief of that day didn’t have to take two wars, drone strikes on weddings, the black sites, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, the goddamn lingering indignity of hours-long interrogations that so many of my Muslim comrades go through just to travel to this day."