9/11 Research Paper

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”(Benjamin Franklin, 1755). People cannot have both absolute privacy and absolute security. The two cannot co-exist. Instead, the government must make its citizens safe while adhering to their rights as Americans. But after the events of 9/11, the government has seemed to stop caring about the latter, instead utilizing America’s fear of the terrorism to take away civil liberties and pretend citizens are more secure because of it. While there are pockets of discontentment, a Gallup survey revealed the 85% majority does not feel the government poses an immediate threat to people’s freedom or civil liberties, although recent breaches of …show more content…
And these infringements are only the beginning. If Americans remain passive against government misconduct, the government will corrupt the law further until the nation resembles that of 1984 by George Orwell. But unlike citizens of Oceania, Americans have awareness of government wrongdoing and can stop it before the president becomes Big Brother v2.0. By protesting the post-9/11 initiatives involving citizen spying, immigration and deportation misconduct, and poor treatment of Muslim Americans, Americans can bring an end to the infringement of their rights.
The events of 9/11 unnerved America and demonstrated the need for altercation in the United States Intelligence Community conduct. Many Americans, particularly those with left-wing political beliefs, view the new laws and resolutions in national security to be fitting considering 2,605 citizens died and 6,294 were hospitalized for related injuries. To prevent a …show more content…
They shouldn’t. But the NSA is not just spying on potential terrorists or the people connected to them. They have access to nearly 50,000,000 Americans citizens’ phone records and, and that number is only a low-ball estimate. Predictions range anywhere from 49,000,000 to 210,000,000. If the NSA honestly believe 49,000,000 Americans might be involved in terrorism, there is an obvious intelligence deficiency in our government. How are numbers this high even warranted? On the subject of warrants, in the eleven years following 9/11, over 15,000 warrant applications were processed for the NSA to wire-tap, or eavesdrop, on phone calls and text messages while only ten warrants were denied. To turn that into a percentage, a warrant needed by the NSA has a 99.999% of being issued by a judge. A percentage that high proves there is no checks-and-balances system in regard to the NSA spying on phones, just rampant power. The NSA isn’t the only government institution infringing on citizen’s rights. In the aftermath of 9/11, forty-eight bills and resolutions were approved and 263 government organizations were either created or reorganized. In 2001, reporters at the Washington Post found over 1,200 government organizations and 1,900 private companies do work related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence. The Coast Guard, TSA and Border Patrol budgets have all more than doubled since 2001. And what good have

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