From 2008, Intrusive New FBI Surveillance Guidelines Proposed, which the ACLU warned would result in mass data-mining:

“This seems to be based on the idea that the government can take a bunch of data and create a profile that can be used to identify future bad guys,” he said. “But that has not been demonstrated to be true anywhere else.”

Here is Ashcroft's 2002 pitch for more FBI surveillance tools, DOJ's 2002 guidelines factsheet, and 2003 NSA guidelines.

There's also this 2003 Defense Department memo where the DoD gets into the act of issuing national security letters. Here is the Defense Department's 2004 instruction sheet on getting information from financial institutions. On National Security letters, see The FBI is Spying on You and Me (2005.)

This has never been just about terrorism. Here's an example of the FBI using "sneak and peek" warrants in a domestic cock-fighting case. In 2004, Ashcroft used the Patriot Act to bust pot-smugglers. In 2005, Senator Russ Feingold warned us sneak and peeks are about drug cases, not terrorism. Remember in 2005 when they inserted a Meth bill to limit cold pills into the Patriot Act extension? And a narco-terrorism provision?

In 2005, the Justice Department opposed a provision in the House bill to renew the Patriot Act that "would require the Justice Department to report to Congress annually on government-wide efforts to develop and use data-mining technology to track intelligence patterns."

Also in 2005, the FBI was forced to admit it wiretapped the wrong numbers using authority in the Patriot Act.

More in 2005: Bush creates a new national security division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation that will fall under the overall direction of John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence. Purpose: to tear down more of the wall between intelligence and law enforcement.

Bush also wanted the FBI to be able to avoid judicial review of FBI seizures of business and financial records. All they had to do was declare the records were relevant to a terrorism investigation (no obligation to assert the records are likely to reveal evidence of a crime.)

When the FBI got caught misusing its authority to get NSL letters, FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a mea culpa to Congress that basically said:

Yes, we abused our Patriot Act authority by spying on Americans who weren't suspected of terrorism, even though we promised that we wouldn't, but now that we've been caught, we really really promise not to abuse that authority again, so please don't take it away.

From 2006: FBI snoops on phone records of journalists at ABC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to determine who in the government may have leaked classified information to news outlets.

From 2004: DARPA's plan to spy on entire cities using blimps. And Matrix, the Multistate Antiterrorism Information Exchange, which was an attempt to create a crime-fighting database with data mining capabilities that could have allowed police to create lists of people who fit criminal profiles based on their ethnicity, address or credit history. The GAO said that the federal government has more than 120 programs to collect and analyze personal data so they can predict the behavior of individuals.

From 2003, one that didn't make through Congress: Patriot Act II, officially named the Domestic Security Surveillance Act of 2003. Here's what Bush proposed in 2003. More here. Bush and Ashcroft also tried to give us the Victory Act, which redefined drug crimes as terrorism, with lots of increased surveillance authority, such as:

Raise the threshold for rejecting illegal wiretaps. The draft reads: "A court may not grant a motion to suppress the contents of a wire or oral communication, or evidence derived therefrom, unless the court finds that the violation of this chapter involved bad faith by law enforcement."

....Extend subpoena powers by giving giving law enforcement the authority to issue non-judicial subpoenas which require a person suspected of involvement in money laundering to turn over financial records and appear in a prosecutor's office to answer questions.

2003 also gave us the Lone Wolf bill, named for Zacarias Moussaoui.

"The legislation, known as the 'Moussaoui fix,' was approved 90-4. It would make it easier for the FBI to seek warrants for wiretaps and searches on non-Americans suspected of planning terrorist attacks, by eliminating a requirement to show the suspect was connected to a known terrorist group or a country that sponsors terrorism."

There's the Total Information Awareness Plan and many more examples in the timelime of how the U.S. became a surveillance state in the decade since 9/11. I'm out of time now and have just scratched the surface. TalkLeft has more than 500 posts on the Patriot Act alone. There's another 200 posts on electronic surveillance, going back to 2002 that I haven't reviewed today.

Shorter version of all this: Utter the word terrorism and while everyone ducks, the Government suspends the Constitution.

On giving terrorists what they want:

Who needs the terrorists to take down America when the Government is doing such a better job of it by eradicating the civil liberties that are the hallmark of this great nation? At one time we were the beacon of liberty in the free world. That light has been dimming since September 11, and unless we clap three times for Tinkerbelle, it's about to go out.