Privacy Has Been Effected After the 9/11

What I believe is that order has been sacrificed in order to keep this country theoretically safer. After the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, everybody knew that it was not to be the same as it was once. The United States defiantly could not take freedom for granted anymore so laws where passed to keep America supposedly safer. But what has happened is a total disregard for the peoples right to privacy, and tighter control over illegal immigration. Homeland security was created shortly after the September 11, attacks and has become one of the largest departments in the U.S. government. The U.S. Patriot Act was also passed almost unopposed by congress. It seems that after the attacks people felt that it was necessary to lose some freedoms to keep the country safe. But is the Patriot act a tool used to spy on terrorist or has it just become a tool to spy on the public in general. After the whirlwind of post 9/11 it seems that order was put aside for a while and fear set in for Americans knowing that the country was not invincible as we all thought it was.

For example the U.S. Patriot Act was passed in 2001,which basically gave the U.S. government total authority to spy on American civilians. Under the sections of the U.S. Patriot Act, the government could keep tabs on what books you checked out of the library, internet sites you visited, emails you wrote, credit card records, medical records, car rentals and many more things (Sec 215). The government specified in the Patriot Act the no need of probable cause to investigate people. The government thus not need a warrant to wiretap a phone line or even to come to your house and search you (Sec 215). What has happened is that the Patriot Act allows the government to freely spy on anyone with little restrictions of what they can get a hold of in terms of information .The government dose not need to show probable cause, nor even reasonable grounds to believe, that the person whose records it seeks is engaged in criminal activity. They simply need too state that the surveillance is needed for an investigation regarding possible terrorist activity. The Patriot act was created to seek out terrorist activity but what it truly does is violate peoples right to privacy. The Government has taken the Patriot act to the next level with the introduction of Real Id, passed in 2005. Real Id was passed with the idea of helping to fight terrorism. A national identification card that would go into

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