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Again, my point is that you're muddying:

"I complain every time there's an expansion of federal goverment power that I believe is inconsistent with the Constitution."
"Yes, sneak and peek searches existed minimally before"
"And under other rules (not Patriot), the government reserves the right to detain people in secrecy without trial."

Your abortion analogy only holds if the Patriot sneak-'n'-peek are fundamentally different in character than those already in existence. I do not see that other than your assertion.

The Patriot Act allows law enforcement to issue their own subpeona, without probable cause or specificity about the items they're searching for. So, law enforcement can go on a fishing expedition into anyone's life, without the probable cause and court oversight, checks and balances that underpin our justice system.

Here's where hyperbole comes into play. You make these assertions which, on their face, are ridiculous. If "law enforcement can go on a fishing expedition into anyone's life, without the probable cause and court oversight" then why bother having warrants at all anywhere? Obviously, if these are provisions of Patriot, they have to be spelled out very specifically, which would alter your characterization of them.

The sneak and peek searches codified in Patriot are fundementally different. Here's an explanation (the Senate killed the Otter Amendment by the way, even though it passed overwhelmingly in the House):

The Otter Amendment would effectively prohibit any implementation of section 213 of the PATRIOT Act, which permits federal agents to obtain sneak and peek warrants under a very low evidentiary standard, making them far easier to get than before the bill was passed. Sneak and peek or "black bag" warrants, as they are also called, allow agents to search homes, confiscate certain types of property and essentially "bug" computers, without notifying the subject of the search that it is happening for an often indeterminate amount of time.

Here's another:

"The new law greatly expands the legal use of so-called "black-bag" searches. Law-enforcement authorities using this secretive procedure are not required to notify the subject of an investigation until after the search has taken place, if authorities can claim that such a notification might hamper the investigation by allowing the suspect to tip off associates. In the past, suspects were usually notified when law enforcement conducted a search, although occasional exceptions were allowed for searches of electronic data. The new bill, however, has the effect of expanding to any criminal case the authority to conduct secret searches."

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/01-14-2002/vo18no01_unamerican.htm

You're making my point. You say "obviously" without having read Patriot -- you're engaging in this exchange with merely an assumption that Patriot is A-OK. If you're truly interested, you may want to actually go and read the text, specifically the definition of "terrorist." You'll find that it's extremely vague. For example, Rush Limbaugh could be prosecuted under the definition of terrorism in the Patriot Act.

Furthermore, once you remove the requirement for court OK of a warrant and the requirement for probable cause, the need for a warrant does becomes much less meaningful.