Quite a cynical take, but I understand this talking point after hearing it for the past 20 years. Many people would consider themselves freer if they were living under possible surveillance in a safe society, versus in a surveillance-free society with the constant fear of random terrorist attacks.
There is room in the middle between those two extremes. Law enforcement had serious interagency rivalries, the intelligence community wasn't able to say when another WTC attack would happen after the previous one, and even after that one nobody was living in the fear of random terrorist attacks, even though we had plenty of domestic ones.
My personal opinion is when confronted with their failure to accurately predict and prevent the 9/11 attack, law enforcement and intelligence both said well just give us all the money and unleash us. Our society is less safe now not because we decided to throw money at the problem, but because we decided to retaliate with force, which never deescalates the situation without a total victory.
So now we have less freedom thanks to the surveillance state, absurd debt levels, and no progress in fully dismantling the terrorist network.
