This is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual.<p>Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a <i>shoplifter</i> and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.<p>Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.<p>We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.<p>Why this headline, <i>now</i>? And also, why <i>this</i> headline, now? <i>Now</i> and <i>this</i> because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against <i>them</i> (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.<p>At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."