Revolutionary Road- Surveillance?

Mid-way through the book Revolutionary Road, the main characters mention Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin senator during the 1950’s that was so anti-communist that his actions created the term “McCarthyism.” McCarthyism includes the creation of false claims of anti-US activity to incriminate random US citizens, and also the use of the FBI to monitor US citizens to make sure nobody was against the US Government. Now while McCarthyism faded and disappeared completely by 1960, today we have a new brand of Surveillance, The Patriot Act. The Patriot Act’s full definition is “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.” Now this sounds great and all, and after the tragedy of 9-11, the country did need to beef up security in some areas, (you could walk up to the gate at an Airport before 2001,) however, The Patriot Act today monitors everything that we do. The Government agents working for the FBI can seize information without warrant, which might not sound bad, but sometimes the government doesn’t have its citizens needs prioritized where they should be. (For example, Amazon Echo is never really off/not listening, it listens to you to say the work to reactivate it. And the government can listen in to any Echo without any warrant. You are literally putting government wiretaps into your house) The even scarier thing is that the last three US presidents, Bush, Obama, and Trump, have all renewed the bill, with approval each time from Congress. And some people can say with a straight face that Republicans and Democrats are vastly different from each other. They seem to love working together to restrict civil liberties, so that in the future they can arrest anyone that steps out of line. Joseph McCarthy would have loved to see how much Americans are watched today, and it leaves me wondering how long it is until we end up living in 1984.