Sorry but I’m totally uninformed on this. But this article made interesting reading. Those who want to debate on the points I thought were significant can do so.

And the reauthorization debate offers another important opportunity as well—the chance to blunt one of the most important implements in the anti–law enforcement tool chest: the “slippery slope” argument. Both right-wing and left-wing libertarians reflexively argue that any commonsensical reform of the law-enforcement status quo will send the nation hurtling toward government tyranny. [...] To avoid torpedoing preemptive investigations of terrorist or criminal plans, section 213 allows the government to ask a judge for permission to delay notifying the target of a search that his property has been examined. The judge can grant the delayed notice request—only after a traditional probable cause hearing on the warrant itself—if revealing the search would risk the destruction of evidence, or would put a witness’s life at risk, or would seriously jeopardize an investigation, among other reasons. The government can delay notifying the subject only for a “reasonable” period of time; eventually officials must tell Atta that they inspected his hard drive.

The author seems pretty anti-libertarian.

The libertarian crusade against this commonsensical rule has been unrelenting. And the favorite conceit used against it is the slippery slope, the cornerstone of libertarian thought. “Give power to government, and it will be misused,” …

After giving some examples and pointing to a certain Section 213 of the Patriot Act–in fact, his whole argument is pretty much based on, and to defend Section 213–he makes this assertion.

If minor tinkering with traditional law-enforcement rules opened the way toward government tyranny, we would already be living in a police state.

From Wikipedia, I have this explanation about the nature of small acts–or as the author says, tinkering:

…many civil libertarians argue that even minor increases in government authority, by making them seem less noteworthy, make future increases in that authority more likely: what would once have seemed a huge power grab, the argument goes, now becomes seen as just another incremental increase, and thus appears more palatable…

How far this guy’s interpretation of the issue as “tinkering” is plausible is beyond my understanding. But the author continues his justification:

The government by now would have taken its delayed notice power and done away with notice entirely. Every search would be permanently secret. And the libertarians would have examples aplenty of the government abuse that has flowed from delayed notice rulings.

In fact, the libertarians have no such evidence. They have pointed to no case over the last two decades of misuse of the delayed notice authority. Their arguments against section 213 remain purely speculative: it could be abused. But they don’t need to speculate; they have the historical record—and it refutes them.

So what fallacy is this? Because the historical record shows no state abuse, can we conclude that the state won’t resort to abuse in future? Meanwhile, this article vehemently says that the Patriot Act is a comeback of McCarthyism “in a big way”.