Back in the good old days, when I saw an article like this one in TechCentralStation, with its dubious opening claim that “[t]he Patriot Act gave the government sweeping authority to gather intelligence on American citizens and imprison them for long periods without due process,” I would have called an expert or two to debunk it and then reported what I’d learned. Nowadays, I bring it to an expert’s attention and he does the debunking himself. So much for the middleman.