Post 9/11 Privacy

Improved Essays
Post 9/11 Privacy
Prior the terrorist events that took place on September 11 (9/11), privacy was of minimal concern to most people. Of course they were concerned about identity theft and credit scores, but that paled in comparison to the fear that was generated by events on 9/11, which opened the gateway for new levels of privacy encroachments and examination that many are not comfortable with in their day-to-day lives. Ultimately, the argument comes down to whether people are for or against privacy loss in the wake of an ever-increasing terror threat. As Solove (2008) describes it in his article many individuals have chosen to accept an infringement on their privacy rights in order to be secure in the threat to terrorist activities. Although people may accept this, they may want to think twice knowing the issues involved with such a statement. The goal of this paper is to examine what privacy is as well as examine the changes to privacy that was initiated by the events of 9/11 to illustrate which side of the privacy argument can be agreed upon. Privacy is the ability to be not only left alone, but to also be able to decide what information is shared, who can use that information, and for what purpose. This used to be a simple task of reading end-user license agreements or reading the fine print on documents to understand how information is to be shared, but after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the ability to collect ones information has become more far-reaching than ever before. With the fear generated by the terrorist acts on 9/11, many Americans felt that giving up their privacy in exchange for preventing unseen terrorist activities seemed a reasonable tradeoff.
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However, the scope of this tradeoff has overreached their expectations of reasonable privacy infringement and this balance between security and personal privacy has become the hallmark of the privacy debate. In fact, the events of 9/11 helped to solidify the already growing situation in which technology developments were making information gathering simpler and existing laws for information gathering were undergoing drastic changes (Shamsi & Abado, 2011). These changes in privacy laws have been the focus of many issues laws include the scope of domestic information gathering, lack of surveillance justification, lack of disclosure, weakening of judicial controls, the environment in which it was created, economic issues, complicated technologies, and the dangers associated with maintaining large databases of sensitive information (Cavoukian, 2003). Firstly, citizens need to understand that with the new-found security that comes with these laws also comes scrutiny from the Government into every aspect of their lives. This coupled with advancements in computing, allows the Government to examine every part of one’s life with little or no knowledge of the information collection itself. The information gathered is not limited to email communication, but also location, Internet traffic, actual phone conversations, and the like. This information, once protected under Constitutional rights to privacy (Amendment IV) has quickly become available to the Government with no notice, warrant, or probable cause to collect. More specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed the Government to perform covert information gathering on foreign entities without probable cause was expanded to include domestic targets as well. This became known as the US Patriot Act (Shamsi & Abado, 2011). Most people believe that they have nothing to hide from the Government, but there is little repercussion if the Government was to find something. That is to say, that the laws afforded to the Government’s ability to monitor citizens, gives them right to make rash decision …show more content…
After the attacks of 9/11, nearly 263 government agencies were reorganized as well as the creation of the Department of Homeland security, which nearly doubled the intelligence budget from 2001 (Freedman, 2011). Much of the technology used in surveillance efforts is off-the-shelf and is lacking in innovation. Moreover, the technological boom in the private sector has afforded the Government many avenues in which to collect information on private citizen including social media, cell phone records, GPS information, financial records, medical information and other third-party services that are capable of storing gigabytes of information on an individual (Shamsi & Abado, 2011). This notion leads to the issues of that information’s security

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