There's a great question posed over at Slashdot about actual abuses vs. potential abuses of the PATRIOT Act. As usual for Slashdot, a wide variety of viewpoints are expressed but the majority seem to be some flavor of progressive:
We made our constitution difficult to change to protect our children from cowards. Cowards who run crying, begging for protection from terrorists at any price - even though they kill fewer people than slipping and falling, even though they are selling freedoms that sufficed for us through many, many crises before. I'm sure there are many here who are scared enough of Osama to sell out their civil rights on the chance it will make them a little safer. It's the price we all pay for the general ignorance of history.
If was was stuck on a desert island with only 3 websites, they'd be dkos, slashdot, and ebay.
Here's the link. Thread currently has 780 comments so I suggest you change the rating threshold from 1 to 5 to cut that number down.
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/1419225&tid=103&tid=219