PATRIOT act used mostly to persecute minorities..

...but different ones from the ones you'd think! Turns out 69% of all sneak and peak warrants, a mechanism allowing law enforcement to search people's homes without knowledge or consent, were used against "drug dealers" (page 7 on the PDF). While Sneak and Peaks did exist before according to Senator Feingold the PATRIOT act "codified and expanded" the practice. Anti-Terror sneak and peaks accounted for 0.39% of the total, less than those used by the FDA.

Huffington Post expands on it here.

thanks jonny