IMO, It's not going to happen overnight (but you never know).
It has been going on for over 30 years, incrementally. Our liberty has been slowly eroded since the 1990s.
It got started under Bill Clinton. On July 14, 1994, President Clinton's Deputy Attorney General and later 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that
the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes … and that the president may, as has been done,
delegate this authority to the Attorney General.”
This “inherent authority” was used to search the home of CIA spy Aldrich Ames without a warrant. "It is important to understand", Gorelick continued, "that
the rules and methodology for criminal searches
are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities".
Then Bush made it worse with the so-called "Patriot Act" that further eroded our liberty. It introduced a new set of legislative changes which significantly increased the surveillance and investigative powers of law enforcement agencies in the US and significantly decreased the law abiding citizens right to privacy.
That was followed up by Obama's NDAA of 2013 that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens without being charged with a crime or having the right to legal counsel. NDAA also authorized the president to indefinitely detain or
otherwise dispose of anyone, American citizen or not, that “substantially supported” our enemies or their “associated forces.” No definition of the quoted terms has been forthcoming from our government. The vast amount of information compiled on all American citizens via the NSA listening in on all cell phone conversations is a direct result of NDAA and a direct violation of the 4th amendment.
The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) oversees a “disposition matrix,” where “disposition” refers to
disposing of human beings without charge or trial, using all the best resources the government can muster to efficiently kill or capture our enemies, real or
imagined.
Add to that the militarization of local police, and the imposition of warrantless stops of vehicles at Border Patrol Checkpoints nowhere near the border, and DUI checkpoints, both without any probable cause for the stop, and the TSA, which has NEVER caught a terrorist, conducting searches that amount to sexual molestation in many cases, and it is obvious we are losing our liberty one small piece at a time.
It reminds me of the old "frog in the pan of water" illustration. As long as it is done slowly and we are given time to get used to each incremental reduction of our rights we don't complain.
