COINTELPRO?

This is based on the incorrect impression I was working on when making that argument, corrected elsewhere in this thread--Hoover the president and Hoover the first head of the FBI were different men.

It's pretty likely that your and my (dis)taste for particular politicians and parties overlaps, but keep in mind that only one single senator voted against the passage of the Patriot Act as originally presented. My strong suspicion is that the association of W. with the modern surveillance state, while accurate, has far more to do with timing than with party.

Clinton and CALEA don't get enough credit for creating the infrastructure of the modern American surveillance state.

They wouldn't willingly but they can be forced, the agencies aren't natural phenomena they exist because they're legally allowed to, it just takes a greater political will that isn't isolated to one political party, because from the TLA's POV these programs help them do their jobs and politically it's easier to be seen 'doing something' about threats than it is to say 'some threats are only counterable by fundamentally sacrificing freedoms that shouldn't be sacrificed.' This is partially because the sacrificed freedoms are less tangible and real than the threats, it's hard to quantify the trade-off of living in a surveillance state to most people vs the idea that people could just come in one day and blow up/shoot up a store/concert/festival you happen to be in.