Gosh, well, I'll just play the role of conservative here.
If anybody thought that terrorist attacks would primarily come from Muslims, they were just kidding themselves. You could hardly expect a Harvard preppie to be easily accepted into a working-class bar in Mississippi. Likewise, you could hardly expect a Muslim, or even someone looks Arabic to get very far trying to pull of a terrorist attack. That means the best move for the bad guys is to radicalize whites, blacks, and asians. Even if people intellectually understand this, they still will not have a knee-jerk reaction to groups not commonly associated with Muslims. So that means...you gotta watch everybody.
But if you have that, certain things like privacy get stepped on. It sucks, but it's the world we live in. People are unhappy with the civil liberties that Dubya trod upon, but on the other side of it, we see no terrorist activity in 2011. Some may claim that's because there wasn't any, but isn't it possible that this is proof of the effectiveness of foreign and domestic intelligence services? There was a spike of activity in 2009, but no buildings cam crashing down. The terrorists got owned, and I think they know it. I think they're backing off because all those open doors in our very open society got shut down. They aren't able to exploit us as effectively as before.
So does this mean we can relax? I say no. If you install a firewall on your computer to combat a rash of viruses, and two years later you realize you haven't had a single attack, should you bring down the firewall? Hell No! The existence of the firewall is what kept you safe. Removing it removes your protection and merely provides a hole for the bad stuff to return. When we can see the entire movement of Radical Islam die out - I think it will in time, because even the vast majority of ordinary (peaceful) Muslims don't care for it - then I think we can relax. But for now, we need to stay diligent and put up with self-induced impositions a little longer.
