National Patriot Act

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September 11th 2001, a day forever scorched into American history. The attacks of September 11th changed the nation both on the homefront and abroad. Just thirteen days after the attacks The USA PATRIOT act was introduced into congress. Thirty-one days later the bill was passed with a 98-1 vote in the House of Representatives. The law, then passed to allow government officials to conduct surveillance on suspects of terrorism and other matters of national defense. However, in 2006 USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans”, using it to track calls in order to protect against terrorist threats (Cauley). This overstepped the initial wording of The …show more content…
Specifically in section 203 it states “to permit the sharing of grand jury information that involves foreign intelligence or counterintelligence with Federal law enforcement, intelligence, protective, immigration, national defense, or national security officials... subject to specified requirements” (United States Cong.). It was this section and its use of the word ‘sharing’ that the National Security Agency (NSA) would go on to collect the databases of phone calls, emails, and internet records exposed by contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. However, after this exposure lawmakers rapidly enacted the FREEDOM act and surveillance continued. Though restricted from the original free reign of surveillance, the FREEDOM act allows for “2 hops” from one piece of information to another. This meaning that once receiving a single person’s 100 facebook friends, then if investigating you the NSA could use their “2 hops” to gain access to over 2.6 million other facebook …show more content…
That means that as of 2013, by collecting billions of cell phone records and internet histories, the NSA had squashed upwards of twenty-four cases in twelve years. That gives data collection to threat dilution ratio of nearly 87.6 billion to 1 in the 12 years since the law passed. In a 2013 senate hearing “Representative Adam B. Schiff, pressed [NSA Director] General Alexander to explain why the F.B.I. could not simply get the relevant logs of calls linked to a suspicious number without keeping a database of all domestic calls” (Savage). To this, Alexander claimed that there was simply not enough time to comb through all that information. Other protesters ask how collecting billions of documents could in any way be easier than just those of terror suspects. Supporters claim that to find a needle in the haystack, you must first have the haystack. This has seemed to dwindle in importance as the haystack continues to grow extensively compared to the
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