
“‘This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,’ wrote the late William Safire of The New York Times in 2002, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11. ‘Here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive . . . will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database.’ ’ Twelve years on, this is the world we live in, but worse. Through a combination of fear, cowardice, political opportunism and bureaucratic metastasis, the erstwhile land of the free has been transformed into a nation of closely watched subjects.”
http://nypost.com/2014/02/01/welcome-to-the-united-states-of-paranoia/