Be paranoid: we're only beginning to learn what the executive branch can do to us.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Editorial

"WHAT ARE YOU afraid of Matt?"

That was the subject line of an email I received in April 2003, shortly after I wrote a column for the progressive website AlterNet warning about the federal government's post-PATRIOT Act plans to increase warrantless surveillance on unsuspecting U.S. citizens.

"I wonder about you lefties who fear these upgraded measures of security," a person identifying herself as Lynn McLaughlin wrote to me. "You must have something to hide, and since my husband works for the DIA, I'll make sure he looks into what it may be."

The DIA stands for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the central collector and interpreter of foreign military intelligence for the United States Armed Forces. According to the agency's website FAQ at the time (though not now), the DIA was "prohibited by law and in no circumstance does it collect information on U.S. citizens or on information not related to military intelligence."

Though exact figures for budget and payroll are classified "due to security considerations," the DIA has an estimated 16,500 employees--just a bit more than the number of agents working for the FBI. One of those employees at the time, I was told by someone in the public relations department, was a computer systems analyst named Wayne McLaughlin.

They say the past is a different planet, but

spring 2003 was a different universe. The Iraq War had begun. The congressional 9/11 Commission, after being slowed every step of the way by a defiant Bush administration, was only beginning to hold hearings 19 months after the attacks. And my main concern in alerting the feds about my correspondent was to make sure America's defense wasn't being needlessly jeopardized by a loose-cannon spouse. Surely my own government wouldn't snoop petulantly--and illegally--into its citizens' affairs? Boy, was I stupid.

We now know that 2003 was the year the National Security Agency (NSA) opened up Room 641A at an AT&T building in San Francisco to tap into and analyze data flowing through the Internet backbone, even as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was dismissing privacy objections to the PATRIOT Act as "baseless hysteria."

And thanks to an avalanche of revelations this spring and summer triggered by leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, we know that the federal government has collected email and telephone data on "hundreds of millions of Americans" (according to McClatchy News Service), is "systematically searching--without...