Twenty-five years after the Patriot Act, Washington’s surveillance capabilities are growing faster than the safeguards meant to restrain them

By Alan Lolaev , visiting researcher at the Laboratory for Political Geography and Contemporary Geopolitics, Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

On October 26,2001, US President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law, less than seven weeks after the September 11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York. The speed of its passage reflected the extraordinary political and social atmosphere in the United States. The tragedy had shattered the country’s sense of security, and fears of further terrorist activity continued to haunt the country in the months that followed.

In the weeks after 9/11, grief and anger were accompanied by an unprecedented surge of patriotism and national solidarity. President Bush’s approval rating reached 86 percent by late September, and public trust in the federal government rose to levels unseen in decades.…