Where do we draw the line between civil liberties and security?
Post 9/11, Americans were willing to give up some civil liberties in the interest of security. Edward Snowden’s revelations reversed that for some.
On the Tuesday, September 8, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: In the now 25 years since the attack on 9/11, our world has drastically changed. The way we live our lives, the way we travel, the way we interact with our government, the way our government surveils us – all of it – changed. How exactly? USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page joins The Excerpt to share her insights.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
In the now 25 years since the attack on 9/11, our world has drastically changed. The way we live our lives, the way we travel, the way we interact with our government, the way our government surveils us. All of it changed. How exactly? Hello and welcome to USA TODAY’s The Excerpt. I’m Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, September 7, 2026. Joining me to discuss how 9/11 continues to shape our lives is USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page. It’s so good to have you here, Susan.
Susan Page:
Dana, it’s good to be back with you.
Dana Taylor:
Susan, in your piece, you mentioned a number that stopped me in my tracks. Nearly 100 million Americans have no personal memory of 9/11. Our new normal is for them just normal. Can you speak to that generational split?
Susan Page:
Yeah. It is really striking. 25 years ago, it is a long time. On the other hand, I remember very clearly where I was when I heard about the 9/11 attacks. I was on a plane heading to New York. We of course never landed there. My kids were in school. They remember what they were doing when they heard about the 9/11 attacks, but one out of four Americans were born since the attacks took place. So for them, it’s a history lesson. It’s not the visceral personal experience for those of us of a certain age.
Dana Taylor:
I want to look at surveillance and the line that existed between liberty and security before 9/11, how that line shifted in large part due to the US Patriot Act and how it’s shaping our lives today.
Susan Page:
The USA Patriot Act passed in October of 2001. It was just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. It dramatically expanded the powers of the government for its surveillance and investigation in terrorism related cases. And it fit the mood of the moment. Americans were ready to trade some civil liberties in the interest of more security, and that continued for a couple of years. There was a Pew poll in 2004 when by double digits, Americans said that the government hadn’t gone far enough in protecting their security as opposed to infringing on their civil liberties. But that changed a few years later in 2013, revelations from Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor about abuses that the government had undertaken in surveillance of Americans. And by then, by double digits in another Pew poll, Americans said, “The government’s now gone too far. We’re more interested in civil liberties.” This is one of those debates that just has never gotten firmly settled, where Americans want to draw that line between civil liberties and security, it continues to be under debate. It continues to change.
Dana Taylor:
Our willingness to relinquish certain liberties, that marked a stark change in how we define what it means to both live in America and be an American. It’s not the first time in our history that’s happened, but our identity changed that day, didn’t it?
Susan Page:
Yeah. Who’s an American? Who do we welcome to America? One of the ways in which we continue to see repercussions from 9/11 I think is in the debate over immigration, over attitudes toward Muslims. These are fundamental questions that got focused on with 9/11 and they continue, I think, to echo. There are echoes of 9/11 in our lives, some of which we recognize and some of which we don’t, but the question of what does it mean to be an American? Who is an American? Who will we welcome to America? Those are all things that are among those issues that got affected by those attacks.
Dana Taylor:
As you mentioned, support for surveillance within the US has waned Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was allowed to expire back in June. Can you walk me through FISA, what Section 702 authorized and why this lapse matters?
We’re still living in the world 9/11 created
The impacts of the horrific terrorism attacks of 9/11 continue to be felt here in America. Have we learned the lessons of that fateful day?
Susan Page:
So this provision under the FISA law allows warrantless surveillance of foreigners abroad. So the constitutional protection on a warrant would not apply under this law to foreigners who are being surveilled abroad. And the problem has been that sometimes the communications of Americans, their phone calls and their texts have gotten swept up in the surveillance of foreigners. And so the attempt to extend the law has gotten wrapped up in that debate. Some of the investigators, government officials say this is a really crucial tool, but the opponents say either that it goes too far or that it needs more safeguards, and Congress was unable this spring to settle that. Now, all the FISA investigations haven’t been curtailed because some of them were approved over the next year. So these investigations have continued, but if that’s going to be the case looking forward, Congress is going to have to return to this law and figure out what it is they want to do about it.
Dana Taylor:
Susan, you wrote about a growing distrust in government post 9/11 where conspiracy theories found a place in the mainstream. What happened there?
Susan Page:
Well, of course, Dana, conspiracy theories aren’t new in America. There was a time when putting fluoride in water was seen as a CIA plot or maybe a communist plot. So we’ve had these in the past, but with 9/11, which occurred just as the internet was really exploding, it gave new credence and it gave new exposure of conspiracy theories and they have revolved around 9/11 itself. There is a conspiracy theory debunked that 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration, that it was an attempt to create a pretext for the war in Iraq. And experts who study conspiracy theories say they see a through line from that suspicion and all the conspiracy theories we see today on everything from what’s really happened with Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky, to whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Now we’ve had one court case after another, one state recount after another show that the 2020 election was not stolen, and yet a majority of Republicans believe President Trump when he says it was stolen.
One of the things experts say is it’s not so much that the percentage of Americans really embrace conspiracy theories is larger, but what’s happened is we have more Americans who just aren’t quite sure that they can believe the experts or the government officials or the news media when they say something is a conspiracy theory and they shouldn’t believe it.
Dana Taylor:
Matthew Payne is professor at Notre Dame and author of Playing War Military Video Games After 9/11. He spoke to USA TODAY about the shadow of 9/11 in gaming, and it’s not something that I thought about. What did he say about games like Call of Duty and how they’ve taken root in the US military?
Susan Page:
This is interesting. Right before 9/11, the most popular video game in America was Pokemon, which seems very innocent today. And after 9/11, there was a whole new generation of video games that involve warfare, including warfare in public spaces, in big cities, things that replicated what happened on 9/11, and that’s continued today. Call of Duty is the most popular single shooter video game in history, continues to be that. And that’s affected more than the way people play games. For a rising generation of gamers, it’s the way they tend to see, tend to view 9/11. And one of the things we’ve seen with the Trump administration is the use of video games and video game techniques in recruitment for the military and for law enforcement. There are some critics who say that minimizes the true cost and importance of war. Among them, Tammy Duckworth, the senator from Illinois who lost both legs as a helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, but it’s become one of the ways that recruitment takes place.
Dana Taylor:
Susan, of course, the most immediate invisible change in the aftermath of 9/11 was tied to air travel. What did that transformation look like in real time and how much of that is still with us today?
Susan Page:
I’m not sure I even remember what it was like before 9/11. It was certainly easier to go to an airport and get on an airplane than it is today. I was traveling on planes this week and going through the TSA checkpoints and where they restrict everything from what you can carry in your bags to how much liquid can be in a container in your carry-on. So it’s a much stricter system and it’s one of the ways in which Americans just broadly have accepted these restrictions in the name of security. You hear complaints if the TSA agent is abusive or when we had the government shut down and some of them called in sick, so the lines were very long. You really don’t hear Americans complain that airline security is too tough because I think that’s really the result of people remembering what happened on that terrible day.
Dana Taylor:
If one of the 100 million Americans born after 9/11 asked what’s the biggest way their world has been shaped by that day, what would you tell them?
Susan Page:
We have this big debate in America about engagement with the world or retreat from the world, and that’s played out in whether we embrace global trade or whether we want tariffs. It involves immigration. It involves the whole attitude that we call America first. I think that one thing 9/11 did was it really reinforced that idea of America as a fortress, of America first, of the wisdom of being a little suspicious of the world. I think maybe that’s one of the biggest ways in which 9/11 has affected the United States.
Dana Taylor:
Susan Page is USA TODAY’s Washington Bureau chief. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us, Susan.
Susan Page:
Hey, thank you.
Dana Taylor:
Tomorrow on The Excerpt, author Mike Kelly reflects on the unhealed scars of 9/11 and the Americans still living with its consequences 25 years later. We hope you’ll join us.