I'm going with military draft (aka 1940 Selective Services Program) for the win. Thanks for playing "Biggest Single Erosion of Individual Rights and Privacy in the Last Century in the US!!!"
Except I chose to specifically omit that law for the following reasons:
1. The US has a history of conscription going back hundreds of years and was first used on a national level in the Civil War. There are numerous historical laws which essentially did the same thing prior to Selective Services Program being enacted. It is simply a "new" name for a very old policy.
2. The US Supreme court has upheld the legality of the Selective Services Program on a number of occasions by citing Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution:
The Congress shall have power...
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
To provide and maintain a navy
Their interpretation being that non-voluntary military service was ingrained in the constitution much earlier than 1940.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei
3. Whilst conscription may have the
potential to have a greater impact on a particular individual (i.e death), it only affects a relatively small percentage of the population based on gender and age (males between age X and Y). The Patriot Act has the potential to affect every single person in the country, regardless of age or gender. It is far greater in its scope.
I consider being forced to fight and maybe die, slightly ahead of W & Crew looking at my net porn and listening to my 900 calls.
It's a 363 page document and there is far more to it than telecommunications intercepts.
4. A large part of the freedom associated with living in a democracy is an open and transparent government, which is open to scrutiny by the people to which it is accountable. The ways in which the Selective Services Program is implemented (by way of registration and lottery) is open and publicly known. It is open to scrutiny. Many of the actions which the Patriot Act legalise may be conducted covertly and without judicial sanction. It is impossible for the agents and agencies of the government implementing these laws to be held accountable by the public because of these clandestine traits.
So, whilst I do not agree with conscription in general or the Selective Services Program specifically (it represents a massive limitation on individual freedoms), it did not represent a significant
erosion of individual freedom because legal mechanisms to do basically the same thing existed much earlier than 1940 and the concept had been implemented many times before, extending back prior to the Civil War.
In contrast to this, many of the things allowed for by the Patriot Act are completely novel, have no legal precedent and have the potential to be far more wider reaching, affecting the population in its entirety.
