That's a good point about Muslim Americans. And the American authorities were savvy enough to know that if they wanted to install a system of mass surveillance,

That's a good point about Muslim Americans. And the American authorities were savvy enough to know that if they wanted to install a system of mass surveillance, the could limit push-back by selling the effort in racially coded terms that would appeal to the reactionary right. In the ensuing "debate" about surveillance, the government could spin clear violations of the 4th Amendment into "a compromise that balances liberty and security." A note to foreign readers of HN: In America, "terrorism" is an ethnically coded term. Mass shootings by white people - a depressingly frequent occurrence - are almost always described in other terms. In the rare cases where this dodge becomes impossible to pull off (e.g., the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh), the attack will be described as an act of "domestic" terrorism, thereby preserving the clear ethnic subtext that is carried by the unmodified term. The notable exception to this rule is made for environmental activists, who are branded "eco-terrorists", or left-leaning people protesting economic injustices (e.g., Occupy Wall Street). In these cases, the deliberate use of a term with a strongly xenophobic component is a thinly veiled accusation of treason, which is a line of attack long-favored by the more belligerent critics of the American left (e.g., Joseph McCarthy, who provides the canonical example).