Electronic Surveillance Research Paper

¨Usually law enforcement agencies collect data on a suspect after they have been identified. This often resulted in missed opportunities, lost lives, just paving the way for only more destruction. But what if data could be collected in advance, before the suspect was even known? What if just the act of collecting data could result in the identification of completely new suspects? More than a few have pondered this question, just days after the Sept. 11th attacks on New York and the Pentagon, John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer at the time, wrote an internal memo that argued that the government should use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies …show more content…
This is all completely and unarguably justified under the Patriot Act.
Anyone with an Internet connection t can engage in telecommunications and exchange in the United States. Most truly harmful cyber-operations, however, require group effort and significant skill. The attacking group or nation must have clever hackers, significant computing power, and the sophisticated software. The supply of all of these resources has been growing fast for many years in fact, in governmental labs devoted to developing these tools and on enormous black markets that span the Internet.
Telecommunication are the channels through which malware typically travels, and buried in the billions of communications that traverse the globe each day. The targets are the communications networks themselves as well as the computers they connect: things like the New York Times servers, the computers that monitor nuclear plants, classified documents on systems within the Pentagon, the NASDAQ exchange, your very own bank account(s), and your social networking