Many people here have stuck up for the Patriot Act.
Personally I am not keen on it at all but as I am not currently living in the States I am powerless to do much about it.
All I say to people that support it is:
Would you support it if Bill Clinton was responsible for it?
Like I said I really don't understand it well enough to comment on it specifically. Its 132 pages of difficult reading. However, I'm generally against government attempts to gain more authority to intrude into people's lives. At the same time, the government and our laws haven't caught up with the 'electronic era.' For example, as someone who has seen criminals commonly carrying around a bag full of cell phones so they can compartmentalize and disguise their criminal acts, it makes sense to me to authorize a wire tap against the individual and not a specific phone. I've also seen a lot of cases where restriction on computer records matching have enabled an awful lot of fraud at taxpayer expense. An example of that is you're not supposed to be able to get a government small business loan if you are in default on a government student loan but in the past, because they couldn't match records, it happened all the time...and we just got fleeced again. I don't know if the Patriot Act has changed that or not.