The second anniversary of September 11, brought the escalation of rhetorical battles. In August 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft took to the road to bolster sagging support for the Patriot Act. Among the provisions that had been the most controversial were the expansion of the government's ability to search private property without notice to the owner (the so-called "sneak and peak" provision), the increased ability of authorities to gain access to citizens' records held by third parties (such as library records), and a perceived lack of judicial oversight (including the omission of a probable cause requirement for certain searches and wiretaps). Ashcroft claimed the provisions created "tools to provide security and ensure liberty." (Ginsberg, 2003) Critics such as the ACLU described it as "vastly expanding the government's authority to spy on its own citizens, while simultaneously reducing checks and balances." (American Civil liberties Union, 2003) Passed a scant six weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks with overwhelming  support (only one dissenting vote in the Senate and 80% support in the House), the legislation was now under fire. Both liberals and conservatives had come to have second thoughts.

Newspapers began to refer to the "panic" within which the act had been initially ratified. The liberal magazine The Nation argued that "no one had had time to read the…bill before voting." (Cole, 2003) And, writing for the libertarian Cato Institute, Robert Levy agreed:

    Congress' so-called deliberative process was reduced to this: Closed-door negotiations; no conference committee; no committee reports; no final hearing at which opponents could testify; not even an opportunity for most of the legislators to read the 131 single-spaced pages about to become law. Indeed, for part of the time, both the House and the Senate were closed because of the anthrax scare; congressional staffers weren't able to access their working papers. (Levy, 2003)

By and large, discourses of caution had not preceded passage of the Patriot Act on October 25-something about which Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair had waxed bitter in the pages of Counterpoint, complaining that "the US press did not raise adequate [or timely] alarums":

    In this [belated] outburst of urgent barks from the watchdogs of the fourth estate, the first yelp came on November 15, from William Safire. In a fine fury Safire burst out in his first paragraph that "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power." Safire lashed at "military kangaroo courts" and flayed Bush as a proto-Julius Caesar. (Cockburn and St Clair, 2001)

Within days, journalists such as Helen Thomas were warning that "The Bush administration is using the national trauma and state of emergency resulting from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to trample the Bill of Rights." (Thomas, 2001) But Cockburn and St Clair protested, "they waited till after the battle to come down from the hills to shoot the wounded." (Cockburn and St Clair, 2001) And, not until its second anniversary, was the Patriot Act showing serious wounds. . .