Is the Patriot Act Unpatriotic?

The article I read, found here, details the counter-American methods and ideals in the now-infamous Patriot Act. Essentially, the legislative branch, more-so than the other two branches of government, is the branch most responsive to the public sentiment, at least normatively. The resulting sensitive and responsive relationship can only exist effectively if the public possesses adequate knowledge of the laws and associated policies the aforementioned branch passes. Hence, since it required a security leak to expose the mass-surveillance of all the world's citizens being performed by our government, the relationship between the legislative and the public clearly doesn't contain enough knowledge-sharing to provide an effective amount of government responsibility and responsiveness.

The article essentially ends with answering yes to the question in the title, though those particular words are mine alone.

I disagree, however.

I abhor mass-surveillance and disagree vehemently with the NSA and our government for using those methods, but that isn't the question. So, the Patriot Act, along with the resulting mass-surveillance, is actually one of the most patriotic things our nation can do.

Our nation, along with most other western-style democracies, relies on civil obedience to function.

Despotisms, Oligarchies, Monarchies, and other authoritarian states rely on unrestrained, and often times inconsistent force. They imprison, execute, and torture at a whim. That is how they keep order. They display power to keep power.

Democracies, if it can truly be called that, cannot rely on those methods (at least not unrestrained and inconsistent), because that would de-sovereignate the regime: People would get mad and overthrow the government. Instead, western democracies rely on the inclination to conformity that it instills in people throughout their lives; the success of a democracy is contingent upon people becoming nothing more than docile bodies (a term I am borrowing from Foucault).

The process by which docile bodies are created is one that occurs throughout everyone's lives. The most prominent of these - societal norms - exert their micro-power upon us everyday most often in the form of social conformity. However, the juridical ways in which the government keeps us passive can be just as important to that government's success as the non-juridical. The threat of observation - that is, the potentiality of surveillance - is one such juridical policy aimed at the creation of docility. This policy is easily apparent in penitentiaries, but also in hospitals and schools. The panopticonification (see panopticon) creates a state in which one grows up used to the potentiality of being under surveillance. Whenever we are tempted to do something that doesn't go against our morals (which derive from micro-powers), but is against the law, we tend to err on the side of not-doing it, due to this constant threat of observation: It's the "what if I get caught" instinct.

The mass-surveillance of the NSA is thus-far the strongest juridical power that produces docility in our society. It makes the already present fear of observation all-the-more true.

The threat of observation isn't some "big brother-esque" government agency necessarily. For instance, one of the benefits, intended or not, of requiring everyone to go to school is the creation of nation-wide docility, the transformation of independent humans into docile bodies. Through both the micro-powers of conformity and the juridical panopticonification our systems produces workers, regardless of there education levels, that are passive inherently.

As it said in the article, an educated populace is required in a democratic society. It serves the society and the nation. One of the useful by-products of education is docility. Hence, if the desirable product of an institution that is inherently patriotic is patriotic - which, in my mind, it is normatively - then something else that produces the same effect and is instituted juridically is also inherently patriotic. Hence, mass-surveillance is by its very nature patriotic because it instills mass docility, a characteristic that is desirable in any western-style democracy.