[nooneelse]

No kidding. I have tried to put it to people in terms of the cold war. The US faced the existential threat of hundreds of ICBMs aimed and ready to fire. Heck, the combined arsenals may have been an existential threat to all intelligent life on the planet. Those are stakes that could start to justify being afraid all the time and surveilling everyone (if it would help with the threat).

But terrorism? Not even close. The fear of it has already caused damage on us far in excess to what the pissant terrorists have accomplished. All we really should have feared was fear itself. Perhaps one can still make the claim that we are not descended from fearful men, but it will be quite a bit less true should our children try to claim it.