Homeland Security Essay

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Homeland security has become more than an objective within the scope of the mission of Law Enforcement, it has become the mission. The focus has changed due to the terrorist acts on September 11th, 2001. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the USA PATRIOT Act has changed how law enforcement works and even created new jobs within the field.
The USA PATRIOT Act is a law passed shortly after terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The acts on September 11th showed a great need to improve our Homeland security system as a whole. It showed that we as a country were far from impenetrable and raised the flags to help lawmakers decide that more needed to be done to better protect the individual living in the United States. The next question is how as a nation can we protect the citizens of our country better, the Bush Administration soon passed the USA PATRIOT Act. The goals of the USA PATRIOT Act are to make security on the home front stronger along with making the powers of the police stronger when it comes to finding and identifying terrorists within the United States. The definition of terrorism as defined by the FBI is that “"International terrorism" is any activities with the following three characteristics, Involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law; Appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and Occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to...

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... searches and that is one of the major controversies of the act. The controversy is that it is said the USA PATRIOT Act circumvents Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution because it allows law enforcement to search e-mail and telephone records along with medical, financial and library records allow surveillance without probable cause in the name of homeland security. The act expanded the use of National Security Letters. National Security Letters are a type of administrative subpoenas that require who is being questions provide documents about the person or people in question. Under USA PATRIOT Act provisions, law enforcement officers can use these subpoenas when investigating citizens of the United States no matter whether they believe that the person in question has committed a crime or not. Also, they don’t have to acquire a warrant to search records.

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