The Patriot Act "became law only a month after September 11, 2001 -- with little review and amid an atmosphere of fear," an atmosphere counter-productive to positive acts of law enforcement. "The law gave the government sweeping surveillance powers without including accountability and oversight." Non-citizens or 'outsiders' can be indefinitely incarcerated, as a result of the act, and even citizens can find their mail scrutinized and their library and website visitation tracked and documented by the government.
Although...
security is necessary, these stipulations of the act cause one to ask -- why must certain groups and behaviors be demonized, or deemed suspicious, merely because they are engaged in a free search for information? What is the purpose of protecting freedom, if the means of law enforcement curtail that freedom? Although terrorism may indeed be a threat, limiting the tools that Americans have to express themselves without fear, and selecting certain profiled individuals to be the subjects of heightened scrutiny seems to be a prescription for creating a more hostile and divided environment within America's borders that is more, rather than less conducive to terrorist uprisings.
Patriot Act In response to the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, Congress passed the U.S.A. Patriot Act, an act that gives federal officials more authority to track and intercept communications, for both law enforcement and foreign intelligence gathering purposes (Doyle, 2002). The Patriot Act also gives the Secretary of the Treasury regulatory powers to prevent corruption of U.S. financial institutions for foreign money laundering purposes. The U.S.A. Patriot Act
Patriot Act: Advantages and Disadvantages Advantages Increases the Effectiveness of Law Enforcement Agencies The Patriot Act which was signed as law by President George W. Bush on October 27, 2001 reads like a wish list of the law enforcing agencies. It was long-standing complaint of the law enforcers that the provisions contained in the Bill of Rights such as the "due process" of the Fourth Amendment constrained them in their investigations of suspected
Patriot Act The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act was passed soon after September 11. The groundbreaking legislation, which has caused tremendous controversy and outcry among civil rights activists, has become one of the most important pieces of legislation passed in Congress in recent American history. The U.S.A. Patriot Act contains previsions included in previous anti-terrorist bills, including one
It is, in one sense, a give and take relationship, but underlying it are the philosophies of Rousseau and Smith, in spite of the fact that both are full of contradictions. Rousseau, for example, states that man's "first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole
PATRIOT ACT V. FOURTH AMENDMENT Patriot Act & 4th Amendment The Fourth Amendment was created in 1791 primarily to end the existence of general warrants, which the American colonialists hated and feared. These warrants were used by the English government to conduct door-to-door searches and mass arrests, often as a coercive method for achieving social and political goals (Maclin and Mirabella, 2011, p. 1052). With this history in mind the text of
" Prohibiting "a bill of attainder" means that the U.S. Congress cannot pass a law that considers individual or aggregation blameworthy and later discipline them. Disallowing an ex post facto law implies that the U.S. Congress cannot make any given act a crime after the time the act had been committed. It is doubtful that this applies to a few sections of the Patriot Act. Individuals who monitor the Supreme