9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale.
Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11:
I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building.
I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juha...