Even before that news, the GOP Congressman who authored the Patriot Act blasted the previously revealed Verizon surveillance as an "excessive and un-American" abuse of what some of us already feel is....But for many, all these Orwellian revelations are in equal parts deeply troubling and, in the post-privacy world of the Patriot Act, wholly unsurprising. Former NSA employee and famed whistle-blower Thomas Drake feels the “déjà vu” revelations simply show "this sort of surveillance has become routine and institutionalized,” and the Rude Pundit, arguing "no president is ever going to give back the powers that were granted to George W. Bush in 2001," likewise says the "boat has sailed" on our lost privacy.