No. Nobody wants to live in the iron curtain.
This is an absolute and total failure of leadership, from the Bush administration through the Obama administration. 16 years of inexcusable failure. (It probably goes back even further)
People with bombs have not created fear, politicians have.
An interesting add-on to this is to poll about how one feels about Edward Snowden. The result is that the majority view him negatively. (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowde... and http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/edward-snowden-rasmussen-po...)
So unfortunately there is a pretty significant group of people that are okay with increased surveillance.
Note that from what I see, this divide doesn't appear to be traditional US liberal/conservative. In fact, if anything, the divide carries more of a generational rift, where older people are more okay with surveillance than younger people are. (The USA Today poll on Snowden mentions this, and there is also this: http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi...)
For those concerned with digital privacy and rights, I guess the question would be how to counter this narrative of fear that from my viewpoint drives these sort of opinions.
You would get an entirely different set of answers.
Or, if you for example told them that they were currently classified by religion and political leaning, and that they are loosely associated with the bombing of abortion clinics (but don't worry, lot's of people in Indiana are)
America has long been happy to have a more violent police force and higher rate of imprisonment than other countries so long as that violence is directed against nonwhite people. It seems people imagine that they'll be the priviliged ones behind the iron curtain; the neighbourhood informers.
(This is also why e.g. HOAs have such oppressive rules, they're aimed at eradicating "difference" and a form of soft-redlining)
Is that why most of it was achieved through executive order?
Actually that's not why people voted for him. Of all the issues people voted on, national security was/is at the bottom of the issues that were important to them.
While he does believe in collecting basic meta data, he supports having judicial oversight and having courts make rulings on when that meta data can be accessed:
http://truthinmedia.com/trump-supports-reauthorizing-patriot...
>> This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
Actually police militarization goes back to 1981, when Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...) which allowed the US Military to co-operate with local law enforcement agencies during the early days of the War on Drugs.
You also have to remember the environment at the time when the flood of cocaine into this country was turning Florida communities in war zones. Remember the 1979 Dadeland Shopping Mall killings?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/12/cocaine-cow...
Dadeland did not just represent the year’s 37th and 38th drug homicides. The brazen assassination, at midday, in a mall packed with families and ordinary Miamians, was a worrisome escalation. Miami’s police chief told a friend that he feared the Colombians were turning Miami into Medellín. The shootings also introduced “cocaine cowboys” to millions of Americans and almost overnight gave South Florida a Wild West reputation. A prominent Miami executive, Arthur Patten, told Time: “I’ve been through two wars and no combat zone is as dangerous as Dade County.”
This environment of abridged civil liberties, police militarization and increased surveillance is what many Americans wanted, post 9/11.
Donald Trump's election signals a successful vote for more of the same - although one that assumes, in ignorance, the commonly held belief that Obama as a Democrat weakened and undermined the surveillance state and that a corrective policy shift to the right is necessary.