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In my lived experience, I've always considered the passing of the Patriot Act as the day the shining beacon on the hill turned into a Potemkin village.
I remember having long discussions - I was working at Uni of Pittsburgh's Tech Transfer office (in fact we were evacuated since the last plane seemed to be aimed at Cathedral of Learning next door) - on what it meant to have your library books tracked.
https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center/topics/freedom-of-speech-2/libraries-first-amendment-overview/patriot-act/
https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center/topics/freedom-of-speech-2/libraries-first-amendment-overview/patriot-act/
By 2005, it was obvious to a foreign born permanent resident (aka green card holder) particularly brown ones that we were just frogs in the water. When dad sent money to help pay my MBA loan, I got call on a saturday ostensibly from the bank asking what I'd do with the money.
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The irony was that even I hadn't technically received the money in my account since it was saturday. I told him that if he had bothered to wait until monday he'd have noticed it would have been sent directly to my Stafford Loan account. But nooo.... we have to panic on a weekend.
Every day there was a new intrusion. From my own lived experience from 1998 to 2002 in Pittsburgh, to Chicago from 2002 to 2005 and then San Francisco from 2005 to peak 2006, the change in quality of life for foreign born US persons was very obvious, and clearly degrading.
I couldnt breathe by end of 2006. And that's also the year mega surveillance took off. It was all over San Francisco news and grapevine, because the city was obvs the nerve center for all the tech that would be required. Remember the AT&T secret room door? https://www.wired.com/2006/05/att-whistle-blowers-evidence/
Jobs in high end esoteric math and computing were booming. What was that supper club where you had to sit on a huge bed? I was at a dinner party with some design firm friends and others joining us were all very coy about where they worked and what they did.
Catching baddies with high tech was dinner conversation. A feeling - miasma - of eyes everywhere intensified. The first time I heard heavy breathing was on skype with an old friend whose father was a diplomat. This was Feb 2007 & he'd called to tell me to warn me of real estate.
I knew it was time to vote with my feet. The previous november (2006) I had become eligible to be naturalized and i LOVED living in San Francisco etc etc but the feeling of being increasingly unsafe just for being brown was becoming palpable. I was lucky to be free to leave.
I had had a long conversation with an old school friend who was in the State Dept about should I or should I not get an American passport around the end of 2006, and we finally concluded I wouldn't feel comfortable carrying it as it just wasn't me at heart and soul.
This was also when plans were announced that the entire world's data was going to be gathered & all 7 billion people were going to be logged into a database. I remember bcos some guy was quoted in SFchron = "dude, we can't do that, there's not enough of us to follow all of them"
2006 was a watershed year, imo. We were still shocked at the shit that was happening, and people were still indignant about their rights and privacy in a way you'd not recognize given how they're defeated and resigned to it all now. The frog's water is boiling.
