Patriot Act

Kelsey Snell

5-04-05

Mr. Berg

Period 5

Patriot Act

The patriot act: "THE UNITING AND STRENGHENING OF AMERICA BY PROVIDING APPROPRIATE TOOLS REQUIRED TO INTERCEPT AND OBSTRCT TERRORISM." What do you think of when you hear this phrase? This is the phrase used to introduce what we call the patriot act. Pretty much the patriot act allows government officials to search your house which is called a "sneak and peak" without you being aware of it, or even the tracking of your car, or maybe even listening to your phone calls.

The Patriot Act was designed to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks by allowing more information to be recorded for investigation on people that could be possible terrorists. This is needed because in order to arrest someone, they need to commit a crime first. What the Patriot Act is allowing us the ability to watch for any possible terrorist acts before they commit a terrorist attack such as 9/11. Some of the surveillance techniques used +was once prohibited, and now since 9/11 we think that they are necessary to find terrorists and terrorist groups, a few of the laws in the patriot act are self-terminating after a few years. Those years can range from anywhere to 4 years to maybe even 20 years.

We give up many freedoms with the patriot act, and they all have one major thing in common, they intervene with our personal lives and freedoms. Like listening in on our everyday conversations, it's like a machine I guess that listens to the words we say, and if we say bomb, or terrorist. These words are known as "hot words", and if you say these "hot words" a certain number of times in a conversation or over a period of time, they like put you on some thing like "HOT LIST". Along with the other people, and then they start to listen to your conversations and look at them more so than others. This is the same surveillance technology and methods that they use to investigate organized crime and drug trafficking.

Another thing that the patriot acts allows is the government being able to do what they call is a "SNEAK AND PEAK" on your personal establishment, which is another thing used for the surveillance of drug trafficking